Creating the addressing strategy for the Australia and New Zealand Land Information Council

We worked with the ANZLIC ICSM (Australia and New Zealand Land Information Council Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping) to develop their ‘Addressing 2035’ strategy. The strategy was designed to ensure that the addressing policy environment supports standards that are fit for the future, with a human-centered, data-driven and sustainable approach.

The Challenge

The ANZLIC ICSM Addressing Working Group (AWG) was set up to bring Australia and New Zealand’s addressing into the future and enhance the delivery of all addressing services. Addressing is foundational and forms a tangible connection between where people live and how they are located.

When addressing is accurate, commerce and government services flow smoothly. However, the impact of inconsistent or incorrect addressing data can be profound. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for governments to know the location of their citizens as well as their address if there was a quarantine requirement. There is an increasing demand for address and location information at all levels of the public sector that is complete, timely, verified, accessible, secure, authoritative, interoperable, and cost-effective. The current supply chain was structurally unable to provide the quality and latency expected for some jurisdictions to operative effectively and efficiently.

Evolve&Amplify was part of a consortium and the lead consultancy tasked with developing the ‘Addressing 2035’ strategy. This strategy was designed to support all Australian and New Zealand government jurisdictions and the wider stakeholder ecosystem in remediating and future-proofing the addressing supply chain.  

The Approach 

At present, address data is stored and defined differently from one government agency/level of government to another. As such, a complex strategic solution was designed by the AWG and facilitated by Evolve&Amplify consultants and consortium subject matter experts. The primary objective of this strategy was to ensure that the addressing policy environment supports standards that are fit for the future. This is needed to enable interoperability and innovation across the addressing supply chain to deliver great outcomes to the citizens and communities of both Australia and New Zealand.

The task required a strong commitment from diverse stakeholders to overcome challenges with legacy addressing data, improve the management and sharing of addressing information across the supply chain, and the will to both remediate and enhance this valuable resource. 

This strategic process was: 

• Human-centred: Addressing solutions that are co-designed with stakeholders across the addressing supply chain to ensure they are desirable and fit for purpose.  

• Coordinated: Addressing solutions that have appropriate coordination, leadership, governance, and oversight to ensure expected benefits are realised. Impacted stakeholders across all regions and jurisdictions were consulted and taken on the change journey. 

• Data driven: Standards, models, information, and data sets that are appropriately linked, contextualised and accessible to the right users. They can be relied upon to inform addressing outcomes. Interoperability, scalability, and security factors are considered during solution design to enable the seamless flow of data and information wherever possible. 

• Future-ready: Provide the ability to make investment decisions based on the ICSM AWG’s strategic objectives, capitalising on best-of-breed and emerging technologies, reusing, or optimising existing solution patterns wherever possible to reduce technical debt. 

• Sustainable: Addressing solutions that can be reliably operated, sustained and supported. The implementation strategy must always consider the training, enablement and digital literacy needs of users. 

The Outcomes 

Evolve&Amplify, the AWG and the partner organisations achieved the goal of designing the ‘Addressing 2035’ strategy, remediating, and future proofing, the addressing supply chain. The Addressing 2035 Strategy meets the future addressing requirements and aligns with the AS/NZS 19160.1:2018 Addressing Conceptual model standard. This is the backdrop for ‘Addressing 2035’, and the work of the AWG and its consultants in setting forth a vision that is comprehensive and ensures the quality and integrity of ‘addressing’, now and into the future. 

The future of addressing will not just be the modern technical delivery of the information but that it is unified for discovery, access and use across government organisations as well as service providers, for the benefit of citizens.