Awareness Analysis: a Tool for Investigating Inter-organizational Collaboration in Land Administration Systems?

Inter-organizational collaboration is the key to the development of future orientated land administration systems. Different organizations from various jurisdictions need to work together closely when agreeing on how they will jointly register, store, use and share data and how they will make their data available to the wider society. This collaboration is generally regarded as very difficult. In particular, organizational issues are considered one of the key fundamental constraints to inter-organizational collaboration.

In reference to the fact that people in land administration community, often refer to the existence of awareness as a success criterion for the development of inter-organizational collaboration this paper looks at the various factors that affect the degree of internal and external awareness in an organization. The paper furthermore builds a methodological framework for analyzing collaboration in land administration systems. The methodology is tested on four cadastral systems (Victoria, Western Australia, The Netherlands and Denmark).

The paper ends up concluding that it is not viable to use the term awareness and the displayed factors as a foundation for precise measurement of the degree of inter-organizational collaboration in land administration systems. However, the built methodology does provide a helpful tool in pointing out general collaborative problems in inter-organizational relationships in land administration systems.