Dubai Land Department (DLD) is the land registry authority responsible for documenting sales and purchases of properties in Dubai, issuing title deeds, qualifying real estate professionals, and promoting real estate investment in the Emirate.
Since its inception, DLD has led many initiatives to promote transparency and investor confidence, with the vision of making Dubai the world’s premier real estate destination. DLD has also achieved numerous awards and recognitions including the Hamdan bin Mohammed Award for Smart Government, the Best Government Department, and the e-Government Excellence Award. In the Doing Business Index for 2017 issued by the World Bank, DLD was ranked in 1st place regionally and 11th place globally for real estate registration.
DLD has just started adopting blockchain technology in line with the Dubai Blockchain Strategy and the department’s own tenets of transaction transparency, investor confidence, and user convenience.
The technology will allow investors to verify property data that is backed up by timestamp signatures, enhancing the accuracy of data, the credibility of investment transactions, and the transparency and clarity of the market. The platform will also connect tenants with landlords as well as property-related service providers such as water, electricity and telecommunications.
DLD’s records department and document management function has to live up to the promise, and can no longer sustain any inefficient systems, paper records or manual processes.
There are a total of five million archive files with 470,642 ownership contracts including 20,594 for buildings, 135,878 for land, and 313,170 for units. The records department already has an ECM system to help with records and document management, but it lacked flexibility and wasn’t supporting DLD to achieve its objective of digital transformation.
DLD determined that it needed an agile solution to completely transform its records department and enable the retrieval of any document securely and instantly over the portal or smart applications. After meeting a number of providers and reviewing a variety of solutions, DLD made the decision to implement ArcMate Enterprise from NVSSoft.
ArcMate Enterprise is a comprehensive enterprise document management system that is built at its core as a set of web services. The architecture was detrimental to DLD’s decision as it expected a variety of cases for integration with other platforms.
Security was another key concern for DLD, which was addressed fully with ArcMate Enterprise as it features advanced security settings on a granular level, data encryption and integrity, secure connections, as well as digital signatures and authentication services.
The project was led by NVSSoft’s branch in Dubai with the support of DLD’s information technology department, and was completed in a record 73 days including requirement gathering and analysis, data migration from FileNet to ArcMate, integration, user acceptance testing, and training.
With the help of ArcMate Enterprise® from NVSSoft®, DLD was able to achieve a completely digital environment which led to the closure of the records department while retaining its personnel and their experience, training them in the new technology, and transferring them to other departments to help empower the digital transformation.
His Excellency Sultan Butti bin Mejren, Director General of the DLD, commented: “We are pleased to announce the launch of our Smart Archiving System, which will replace our Records Department and traditional archiving operations, representing a key step in our ongoing smart transformation strategy. This is fully aligned with our leadership’s vision of enhancing Dubai’s competitiveness by making it the smartest city in the world.”