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The Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) Addressing Working Group has released a major new report outlining a strategy to “support all Australian and New Zealand government jurisdictions and the wider stakeholder ecosystem in remediating, and future-proofing, the addressing supply chain”.

Addressing 2035 defines a “vision and roadmap to deliver a dynamic and integrated whole-of-government addressing ecosystem, to enable service delivery and support a 3D and 4D digital economy”.

ICSM and ANZLIC say that the “common intent is for jurisdictions and all stakeholders involved in addressing across both countries, to converge on agreed courses of action that will improve addressing capability”.

A major element of the strategy is to ensure that “the addressing policy environment supports standards that are fit for the future”.

The strategy sets out five guiding principles for achieving that goal:

1. User-centred: Addressing solutions are co-designed with users across the addressing supply chain to ensure they are desirable and fit-for-purpose.
2. Coordinated: Addressing solutions have appropriate coordination, leadership, governance and oversight to ensure expected benefits are realised. Affected stakeholders across all regions and jurisdictions are consulted and taken on the change journey.
3. Data Driven: Standards, models, information and data sets 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.
4. Future ready: Make investment decisions based on strategic objectives, capitalising on best-of-breed and emerging technologies, reusing or optimising existing solution patterns wherever possible to reduce technical debt.
5. Sustainable: Addressing solutions can be reliably operated, sustained and supported. Implementation always considers the training, enablement and digital literacy needs of users.

The report’s research team surveyed 161 stakeholders from within the addressing supply chain to obtain feedback on the positives and negatives of the current addressing environment. Respondents included all levels of government, emergency management authorities, utilities companies and many other service providers.

In feedback workshops, 67% of the respondents were address creators, 35% were address collators and aggregators and 45% were address users.

The research came up with 14 common ‘pain points’ that underline some of the difficulties currently faced by those who produce and/or use addressing systems:

1. Address supply chain issues are caused by lack of guidance for applying current legislation and policy.
2. Address assignment errors are caused by a misunderstanding of the address assignment process and lack of stakeholder engagement.
3. There is confusion in roles and responsibilities across the supply chain.
4. The role of property developers in address creation is not clearly understood or consistently managed.
5. There is a lack of adherence to, and inconsistent application of, existing addressing standards.
6. The current spatial definitions of address sites do not match the real-world nature of these objects and are not suitable for future spatial digital twin models.
7. Addresses are assigned late in the development cycle and after survey plan lodgement. This leads to a reliance on lot numbers for the delivery of goods and services.
8. There is no consistent method for representing addresses and sites within complex scenarios (e.g., private facilities such as universities) leading to inconsistent address allocation and no possible validation.
9. Validation services only confirm address validity using point-in-time data and not versions over time.
10. Uptake and adoption of non-authoritative addresses (such as search engines and other technology providers) can conflict with the authoritative address.
11. Citizens’ use of incorrect addresses when dealing with the public sector impacts service delivery and trust in the integrity of the underlying addressing system.
12. There is no feedback mechanism to address points of truth for Government Agencies who encounter incorrect addresses.

In alignment with the aforementioned five guiding principles, the report outlines five enabling ‘strategic pillars,’ being:

1. Harmonised addressing policy: Deliver an addressing policy framework that can be harmonised across supply chains to support a standardised addressing model.
2. Future-ready: Review the addressing model against future 3D/4D needs.
3. Jurisdictional flexibility: Enable customised pathways for jurisdictions to adopt a common addressing model and retain their specific data requirements.
4. Interoperability and linkages: Achieve addressing data linkages to other valuable datasets.
5. Education and communication: Drive an increased understanding of the importance of accurate and authoritative addressing.

The report concludes that “the future of addressing will not just be the modern technical delivery of the information. It will also be unified for discovery, access and use across the whole of government and service providers, for the benefit of citizens.”

Download the report from https://www.icsm.gov.au/publications/addressing-2035-strategy.

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