Land Victoria

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Fujitsu helps Land Victoria to end the paper chase

Buying a home can be a journey into the past. Land titles are some of the oldest legal documents in current use, and retrieving them often a matter of sending archivists into dusty shelving stacks to physically pull them out.

For Victorians, property transactions will soon offer a taste of the future thanks to the land management and information program being undertaken by Land Victoria within the state's Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

Land Victoria wanted to overhaul its titles registry so that property ownership could be checked electronically, with a longer term goal of allowing land titles to change hands over the Internet. But with more than 700,000 real-estate transactions to process each year, and with 3.8 million land titles relating to billions of dollars of real estate on its books - not to mention subdivisions and other complexities - it was a project that had to be undertaken with the most meticulous planning.

Existing records were primarily in paper form - many of them relating to documents that might be 100 years old - and could take days to be retrieved from storage, copied and released, causing frustration to anxious home buyers and sellers.

Having decided to convert those records to electronic form, Land Victoria understood that the structure of the core database and surrounding business systems would be the key to maximising its investment by improving efficiency while providing for the strict record-keeping requirements of property law.

As part of the transformation of its operations into a system capable of supporting real estate transaction records with a speed, flexibility and integrity appropriate to the Internet era, Land Victoria chose Fujitsu and its subcontractors to supply and manage a bespoke application together with the required environment.

Following a comprehensive business analysis of Land Victoria's information requirements, the new system is being built from the ground up to function in an electronic world - it will not merely reproduce the paper-based document processes. The system will support fast registration of new land title transfers and will also retain access to electronically imaged copies of all physical documents.

Eventually anyone from individuals to large businesses will be able to check the ownership of land, and they will no longer have to visit the Land Victoria office to do so. All relevant information will be accessible from a PC via the Internet, including the facility for authorised parties to transfer property ownership. And Land Victoria will be able to offer different levels of access to different groups, such as its own employees, those of other government departments and the general public, altering the presentation of the data as often as it wishes from the core database.

This approach ensures the longevity of the system by guaranteeing that Land Victoria can respond to as yet unforeseen new business opportunities or changing legal requirements. For instance, combining property records with geotechnical or electronic mapping information might offer clients value-added land information.

With its complete portfolio of electronic services, Fujitsu was able to offer Land Victoria not just its systems integration expertise, but the supply and management of the entire platform on which to run the system. Fujitsu will manage and operate the software from its Clayton, Victoria data centre, in a heterogeneous environment that includes an Oracle database, Tuxedo transaction processing and Sun servers.

Meanwhile the physical platform of workstations and a local area network, also supplied by Fujitsu, can be supervised remotely from Fujitsu's Enterprise Management Centre in Canberra. As a further mark of its confidence in the arrangement, Land Victoria included within the five-year contract the requirement for Fujitsu to run the system until the end of the period.