Digitally Transforming Cadastre in Jamaica: Eight Years of Sustained GIS-based Land Management Success

The following is an excerpt of an article published by GIM International, which makes mention of our CEO, Mrs. Elizabeth Stair, and the National Land Agency (NLA).

October 5, 2017

Prior to the year 2000, less than half of the parcels in Jamaica were formally registered, and even the simplest of land transactions took weeks to complete. In 2001, those delays and a public outcry about widespread land fraud led to bipartisan support to merge all of Jamaica’s cadastral departments. A modern system of record immunised to fraudulent transactions was established. That became Jamaica’s official National Land Agency (NLA) and was the first step in the country’s land management digital transformation. Since then, the NLA has experienced extraordinary improvements in processing times and performance – all because of the digitisation of its system of record and GIS-enabled transparency.

One of the NLA’s primary missions in 2001 was to construct a land database to maintain its parcel records in a digital environment that linked to a spatial component and was designed to be used by everyone via an interactive viewer. Through that front end, the public would be given access to the country’s land records with a digital map as the backdrop. On the back end, a parcel data management system would be used to maintain the spatial and attribute components of Jamaica’s cadastral database. Esri’s ArcGIS and parcel fabric standard played a key role in the preparation of the spatial data.

By 2004, the NLA had completed the digitisation of its land records into a single database, now known as the Aumentum Registry implemented by Thomson Reuters. With its disorganised records being the primary culprit in its slow workflows, the first phase of Jamaica’s cadastral revolution was to establish a digital system that tracked the entire history of records from when the assessor entered the basic information into the database to the end of transactions. This immediately sped up workflows and investigations. In addition, automation was used to eliminate manual steps prone to human error. Template forms replaced lengthy coding and custom creation. To ensure security and authentication, an audit trail was required at the end of each step. “Aumentum specified the information required to move transactions forward,” says CEO Elizabeth Stair. “This helped us maintain document integrity and eliminated the possibility of staff not knowing what to do next or who had the document throughout the process chain.”

The full article may be view at the following link: https://www.gim-international.com/content/article/digitally-transforming-cadastre-in-jamaica