Mapping the Business Processes before Mapping the Ground: Building the e-Land Administration Infrastructure

The point of departure for this paper is the 1999 UN-FIG Bathurst Declaration which called for the re-engineering of the land administration systems, through the proper use of information and telecommunication technologies (ICT). This paper argues that to implement the Bathurst Declaration is essentially moving to provide e-Land Administration (electronicLand Administration). e-Land Administration involves a fundamental shift in the way the land registration and cadastre agencies build and develop their information systems, i.e., a genuine and results-oriented move to enterprise systems (ES). The ES imply a distinct focus on the core mission of agency and thus its business processes—i.e., moving from existing processes to e-Processes. e-Processes involve identifying, targeting, and improving an agency’s process base and tightly integrating an ES with it to increase process efficiency and effectiveness. Implementing e-Processes requires a distinct knowledge-base and toolbox of techniques/approaches which are: (1) business process-oriented and (2) land administrationspecific. This paper will present a set of useful guidelines for cadastre and land registration decision-makers as regards the latter by answering the following questions when moving towards an e-Land Administration environment: (a) what type of e-Process investments are available to choose from? (b) how can you identify the core (non-core) business processes?; (c) how you should start the e-Process implementation? Finally, the above framework and underlying principles are illustrated through the lessons from the case of automating the Lebanon’s land registries and cadastre departments—a case of building the UN-FIG e-Land Administration Infrastructure.