Frank Tierolff

LEADERS' OUTLOOK

ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022

The Evolution of a Data Organization

BY FRANK TIEROLFF

CEO, Kadaster, The Netherlands

The Netherlands’ Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency, also called Kadaster, has evolved considerably in the past three decades. It has developed itself from a labor-intensive organization towards a capital intensive organization by adopting automatization and automation. Now, it has become a data organization.

Also, in the last 20 years, the number of public tasks has increased. For instance, we are now responsible for maintaining energy performance certificates, tax valuation, and exchange of data related to it. Also our role in the real estate sector has changed. Apart from being responsible for land registry and legal certainty, we now add value to public tasks in society and contribute to policies related to climate change, energy, and housing.

Information to power decision-making

Despite the financial crisis and the pandemic, the real estate sector has continued to grow in the Netherlands, and is, as such, an important pillar of the national economy. Nevertheless, housing demand remains a challenge; the country is in need of another 900,000 houses in the next eight to ten years. Kadaster is providing spatial information based on data that is fundamental to timely and effective decision-making in this sector. Together with other partners, Kadaster provides information to other stakeholders for better decisions and outcomes as well.

The organization has built, and continues to build strategic alliances with organizations like the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency in order to support the Dutch government in its digital governance and digitalized services efforts.

New processes, new approach

As a data organization, Kadaster focuses on datasets and the processes that lead to those datasets. The organization collects data, validates it, registers it, maintains datasets, makes it accessible and uses the data to build products and services. This also allows it to provide a more integrated picture to its customers.

Tech exploration

Previously the way of dealing with data was exchanging it; a more effective way is to share it, for which Kadaster employs Cloud technology and application programming interfaces (APIs). We are also involved in the creation of Digital Twins, for which we provide information fundamental to these digital replicas. We are also using and exploring technologies focusing on point clouds.

Data governance and ethics

An important aspect of sharing data, is the attention to ethics; we are covering that with new techniques. For instance, we are now doing a proof of concept for an algorithm register, together with others, just to think about how we should be more transparent in the way we use artificial intelligence. Main idea behind it is using and sharing data with transparency and responsibility.

We collect, validate, register and maintain data, make it accessible and use it to build products and services for society.