With the conclusion of the Landonline project’s e-dealing phase, which allows land transactions to be concluded online, Land Information NZ has exited the development phase of the system and moved to a point where online transactions are “part of business as usual”.
The development team, of about 16 people, was wound down at the end of the year. The Landonline unit now consists of a processing division, dedicated to keeping the system going, a system division, to pursue maintenance and enhancement, and a customer strategy division, to handle the current and future needs of users.
When Computerworld spoke to customer strategy manager Jeff Needham last week there were between 40 and 50 users of the e-dealing part of the system. The number of land transactions being concluded online is growing rapidly, Needham says.
Many of the Landonline development team were on secondment from other roles in Linz and have moved back to those former roles; others have left.
The Landonline project has been surrounded by controversy since its early phases, suffering budget and time overruns and at least one major re-evaluation, user criticism of the part-developed system and repeated predictions that the whole project or its second phase, incorporating e-dealing, would be cancelled.
A major setback was the receivership in 2001 of state-owned enterprise Terralink, which was handling the conversion of land information to electronic form, in cooperation with EDS. The latter took on and completed the workload, while Terralink was sold to Auckland’s NZ Aerial Mapping and Animation Research of Dunedin.