Surveyors find holes in Landonline 2

By ADAM GIFFORD

"Good but not good enough," is the verdict of Christchurch surveyors after piloting stage two of Land Information New Zealand's $145 million Landonline system, which allows them to electronically lodge and update survey plans.

Linz says it will delay rolling out the eSurvey part of Landonline until later in the year, once problems identified by the surveyors are fixed.

The eDealings system, which allows lawyers and conveyancers to register titles and other instruments such as mortgages, has won general endorsement from the Christchurch firms on the pilot, and will be made available in the South Island from the end of this month and in the North Island from the end of April.

But the eSurvey component is not expected to be ready for prime time until at least July.

Pilot participants were forbidden by Linz to talk to the media, but some surveyors were prepared to outline their concerns anonymously.

"Linz may have been seduced by this vision of a digital nirvana into throwing out 150 years of paper-based systems, but they will have problems selling it to the surveying profession," said one surveyor involved in the pilot.

"What they have achieved is terrific, but there are links in the chain which need to be addressed."

"I can foresee major problems," said another surveyor, who cited concerns about the way survey plans were formatted by the system.

While the plans may serve their legal purpose, they don't include all the information surveyors and their customers expect from survey documents.

There are also concerns about whether the system can cope with large subdivisions. No such plans were put through in the pilot phase.

Institute of Surveyors Canterbury branch president Warren Haynes said surveyors would have to learn new ways of working.

"The title and survey plans are not done in the way we used data previously, so if we want to do a survey, we will have to interrogate the database," Haynes said.

He said the timing of the pilot was a problem, with Christchurch surveyors handling unprecedented demand for their services before Christmas.

He said the Surveyors Institute will keep trying to influence.

Any changes to the system will be the responsibility of IBM, which inherited the project when it bought consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

IBM refused to comment on the project.

But industry sources say some key project staff left during the merger, and IBM is scrambling to supply the right resources to finish the project, including experts in the underlying Informix database. Landonline did not reply to Herald questions.

Land Information New Zealand