Priorities for capability-building

Retaining practical experience and maintaining technical capability in a self-regulatory, electronic environment

In the context of 'optimal regulation', LINZ has been gradually reducing the detailed advice we provide to the industry on the technical aspects of quality assurance and compliance. Instead, LINZ is reviewing the quality of systems and controls industry participants have in place as a means of assuring compliance with outcome-focused interventions.

There is a need, in the process, to ensure LINZ does not lose touch with the industry and their issues.

To keep pace with industry, LINZ will develop and implement a strategy that focuses on ensuring our regulatory and compliance staff are exposed to, and understand, current industry practices and issues. We will review various options for doing this, such as seconding LINZ staff into private sector industry firms and vice versa, and targeted recruitment.

Improving our connectivity

A key focus in our purpose – maintaining and building confidence in property rights in land and geographic information – is to be more aligned internally, and more closely connected with external agencies and other key industry players.

Internally, different parts of LINZ often work with the same customers and stakeholders. Therefore, we need to have a common understanding of their issues and a unified approach to meeting their needs.

LINZ will develop a strategic context for those industries we work closely with and a holistic view of our primary customers in those industries. From there we can take a more strategic approach to delivering the services they need.

LINZ increasingly interacts with our customers through e-channels. We need to enhance and maintain this electronic interaction capability so that we can proactively and continually identify, manage and improve relationships with customers and stakeholders.

This requires a strong organisational capability in building relationships, and LINZ has worked over past years to improve our responsiveness. We intend to continue improving the systems that support good customer relationships. These help us research customers' needs and evolve our product and service development to ensure that it is centrally driven and co-ordinated.

Developing external connectivity competencies for identifying market opportunities and initiating public and private sector alliances

LINZ's purpose includes encouraging land information markets to develop and mature, so we will need to build an externally oriented capability that complements our core competencies of land information and expertise. This capability will consist of competencies needed for spotting opportunities for economic transformation by facilitating connections in land information markets.

The competencies focus on:

• analysing market opportunities, qualifying opportunities and rationalising the cost benefit of investment
• collaborating across government and with industry stakeholders to ensure barriers to land information market development are addressed
• building relationships to ensure information providers fully understand the information available to them for use in the development of market opportunities, and
• co-ordinating strategy development, managing strategy implementation and evaluating strategy success.

Over 2008/09, LINZ will develop a strategy to ensure these competencies form part of our skill base.

Information technology

LINZ is highly reliant on information technology, as demonstrated by our strategic goal of 'e-delivery excellence'. With the move to electronic delivery of services substantially complete, that reliance will increase.

In addition, our new focus on encouraging land information markets to develop and mature signals significant opportunities for LINZ to further enhance the way we work with other agencies in an integrated way. The focus also places an increasing emphasis on making the land information required by the public and private sectors available in a way that will contribute to economic transformation.

Therefore, the challenge of being responsive to as yet unidentified future needs, while maintaining the core current systems, is a key area of focus for information technology. Given the infrastructure and security implications of this increasingly electronic environment, and the continuing changes expected in the medium to long term, LINZ is reviewing our IT architecture.

We are currently at the stage of agreeing the attributes of a future enterprise architecture that will enable LINZ to evolve and meet business objectives over the next 10 to 12 years. These attributes are based around a formal model for federated IT governance and an enterprisewide view of the business.

Taking this approach to optimising the design and delivery of information technology will enable LINZ to identify opportunities to re-use information and services, eliminate duplication, reduce the total cost of ownership, increase flexibility and agility to respond to change, and ensure that technology investment decisions are transparent and fit for LINZ purposes.

Our primary focus is to detail how this enterprise system architecture will contribute to achieving specific business objectives in a cost-effective manner. This will also include identifying the skill sets and appropriate recruitment practices that will best support our future strategic direction.