A familiar pattern: an engineering firm requests GIS data and inspection records to start a project, receives an export, and begins working from a copy that starts going out of date the moment it is delivered. Meanwhile, the utility's own systems keep moving forward without the engineer's updates.
The fix is not asking engineers to work inside a utility's internal systems, nor asking utilities to adopt an engineering firm's software. It is giving each party controlled, current access to the same underlying information, scoped to what a given project actually needs.
When a project wraps up, results - as-built drawings, updated conditions, new assets - return to that same shared environment, instead of living only in a project archive that the utility may never fully absorb.