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At its last meeting for 2006 the National Steering Committee considered a detailed and independent review of the alignment between Victoria’s EC system (ECV) and the National Roadmap for NECS. The National Roadmap represents the broad agreement among the States and Territories and key industry stakeholders on what a national system for electronic conveyancing should consist of. The Committee requested the review at its June meeting and had received a preliminary report in August.
The purpose of the alignment review was to get a clear indication of the ability of ECV to provision NECS. The National Implementation Strategy within the Roadmap has always envisaged the maximum possible re-use of ECV as the most efficient and effective way of provisioning NECS.
The work was undertaken by a team consisting of the Executive Director of the National Office, an independent systems integrator and a specialist solutions architect. The team was given access to all of the ECV project team’s systems documentation. After a thorough comparison of the documentation against the National Roadmap requirements, principally the National Business Model (NBM) and NECS Operations Description (NOD), the following conclusions were reached:
1. There are substantial gaps between ECV and the National Roadmap, with some of the gaps being a result of insufficient information available from Victoria on how ECV is to be implemented and operated.
2. The principal difference is the inability of ECV to process transactions simultaneously for multiple jurisdictions and that this would be so even if there were no differences between the lodgment and registration practices of the jurisdictions.
3. The area of ECV that holds the greatest potential for provisioning NECS is the work being done to specify the functionality for financial settlements. This is intended to be part of the Stage 2 Pilot of ECV towards the end of next year.
The review found that ECV has been designed and built to meet the requirements of electronic conveyancing in Victoria and cannot directly provision NECS. This is not unsurprising given that Victoria did not set out to build a national system and the National Roadmap has been developed since the majority of the work in building ECV was done. The review team came to the conclusion that it would also be uneconomic to re-engineer ECV for a multi-jurisdiction requirement. Instead, it recommended that NECS be provisioned with a systems architecture specifically designed for multi-jurisdiction use into which some parts of the ECV Stage 1 Pilot system may be able to be re-used.
The review team also recommended that there would be efficiencies for the development of NECS to work with ECV in specifying, designing, building and implementing financial settlement functionality that could both support Victoria’s Stage 2 Pilot of ECV and as well meet the requirements of NECS. Settlement functionality is inherently national in character and largely unaffected by different practices in each jurisdiction. This collaborative approach towards a common goal is possible because the ECV project team is still in the early stages of specifying the settlement functionality for its Stage 2 Pilot.
The Steering Committee directed that the National Office convene a meeting of representatives from each jurisdiction to review the team’s findings. This meeting is expected to be held in January after which the Committee will be in a position to determine the most suitable provisioning strategy for NECS. |