Defining a geospatial IT Strategy for Kosovo Cadastral Agency

Developing a modern cadastre to international standards is crucial for the development of a modern national mapping system.

This involved a number of challenges:

• Developing and maintaining core reference geographies, including large and medium scale topographic data and a new address register.
• Creating an NSDI to enable data-sharing and improve efficiency among government departments and the wider EU.
• Removing the reliance on grant and aid funding to become a self-funding organisation, and having the IT infrastructure to support this.
• Supporting the Kosovo eGovernment strategy by enabling citizens to look up various land registry services online, and ensuring the vital mapping and addressing datasets are in place to do so.
• Building capability and capacity, and retention of key KCA staff.
• Managing a number of legacy cadastral systems which were unreliable and time-consuming.

Ordnance Survey developed a new five-year IT strategy for the Republic of Kosovo, including a new enterprise architecture and NSDI data model.

The approach we used followed The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). This assessed the current state of the organisation and worked with KCA and its stakeholders to determine a target state for the organisation across the business, data, application and technology architecture. We then developed an implementation plan to help KCA achieve their target state and provided training for KCA staff to support the technical implementation of the strategy.

We also developed a new INSPIRE compliant data model for KCA, plus a data modelling framework and trained key KCA staff on how to use them. Recommendations were made on governance structures, future IT management principals, process re-engineering and talent management to ensure KCA had better systems to follow to make better decisions going forward.

The result was a new IT strategy to enable the modernisation of Kosovo’s mapping and cadastre systems:

• Data standardised across Kosovo was achieved – enabling more efficient government integration.
• An underlying model framework which will help greater interoperability, collaboration and data sharing between government departments and across the EU.
• Improved efficiency, resilience, data quality, customer satisfaction, and system flexibility.
• Fewer service disruptions.
• A more cost-effective approach to IT through shared resources across government.
• Knowledge transfer through effective training programmes.