Registry modernisation consulting in Canada
DSarchitek Inc. helps Canadian governments move registries off decades-old mainframe systems while every record keeps its legal meaning.
Why registries are hard to modernise
Land titles, motor vehicles, corporate and personal property, births and deaths: a registry is a legal record, not only a database. A title has to mean exactly the same thing after the move as it did before. Most registries also run on systems older than the people now maintaining them, and many government programs keep their own copy of the same person, so the state holds several partly conflicting records of one citizen.
A registry modernisation therefore succeeds or fails on its data: what counts as the authoritative record, who decides, and how legal meaning is checked at every step. The practice works on those questions first, before the technology is chosen.
What the practice does
- Data modernisation strategies and multi-year roadmaps covering migration, data quality, interoperability, privacy and security, and analytics.
- Data governance programs: the decision process, guiding principles and a steering committee with named owners, stewards and custodians.
- Data Centre of Excellence design, with service lines, a staged staffing plan and data literacy for staff and managers.
- Master data management and identity resolution designs that give one reliable record of each person across programs.
- Data domain definitions, ontologies, taxonomies and record retention metadata standards.
- Assessments that confirm records keep their legal standing through a migration.
Work behind it
On a Canadian provincial registries program, about 50 million records moving from IBM mainframes to a cloud data platform over seven years, the practice designed and set up the data governance program for all seven registry services, designed the Data Centre of Excellence, and wrote the ten-year data modernisation strategy as sole author. It assessed 2.8 million active land titles, worth more than $1.2 trillion, for the move off the mainframe, and wrote the data strategy for retiring a 40-year-old motor vehicle mainframe.
Earlier, at Export Development Canada, the principal delivered master data management within its $2.1 million budget and 18-month schedule. The full list is on the Record page.