 Good morning. Prior to Jamaica deciding to create a national land agency, the National Land Policy, which was published in July 1996, referred to effective land management and administration institutions. Shortly thereafter, the government took the decision to merge the four land administration departments dealing with land titles, survey and mapping, land valuation and estate management. The push for more effective institutions was also as a result of Jamaicans demanding more from the government in terms of performance, transparency, and accountability. So the pre-enlightened status, there are four government-funded departments with individual heads reporting to a permanent secretary with two different ministries. We all had contact with each other, but we did not rely on each other. We didn't really know each other. We had different goals, different procedures, and our staff had different office cultures. We all had statutory responsibilities and operated in our own silos. We received our budgets from the Ministry of Finance, and it was difficult to plan as it varied from year to year. We had minimal control in hiring staff, and there are no formal standards for our customers. So in merging the four departments, the government decided to use the executive agency model of governance. This includes a delegation of authority to the heads of departments, focus on performance measurement, outputs rather than inputs, managerially autonomous agencies, and the provision of quality services, especially related to customer service. The transition started in just about 2000, and it went for about 18 months. So what did we do? We created a new structure. We prepared new job descriptions. We advertised all the posts in the agency, and we interviewed all staff coming into the agency. There was no automatic transfer of staff. If the staff was unsuccessful in their applications for the agency, or if they did not want to work in a new agency, they were redeployed to other government departments, or they were retired on the grounds of reorganization. And this was important because the terms and conditions of employment were changing from a government, a real government institution. So in the end, approximately 25% of the staff were redeployed or retired. During the transition, we also gave a lot of attention to communicating with the staff during the transition by way of general staff meetings, newsletters, focus groups with our customers because we needed our customers to understand what we were trying to do. During the transition, the CEO was also appointed. And so approximately six months before the agency started, I started work. So a lot of the matters I was able to influence from the very beginning. We commenced operations in April 2001, and under this new governance structure, the CEO reports to the minister and not the permanent secretary. The CEO and all directors and managers of the agency are on three-year employment contracts. The Executive Agencies Act was introduced several months after we started, and this is what gave power to the CEO to manage the operations of the agency. Although the individual legislations for the different core areas of title surveys, et cetera, are still standing, because those govern their statutory responsibilities. So in terms of our structure, I'm just going to mention two things. The advisory board. This board is appointed by the minister, and their role is to advise the CEO on the strategic and business responsibilities. They are not an executive board, they are not an management board. It's currently chaired by an attorney at law and we have other stakeholders, the value is represented on it, the land surveyors, a businessman, and a finance person. Information technology is also a very important part of our operations, in that it gives us the ability to improve service delivery. We buy software services, and we design and build some internally. The CEO receives a delegation of authority instrument from the minister of finance. This sets out my obligations and duties, and I'm the accounting officer for the agency. I have full HR responsibility, but if there's an appeal, for example, if somebody is dismissed, then that is dealt with by the services commissions. The issue of accountability was now brought sharply into focus for us. All the executive agencies are monitored by a wide range of government agencies. We have to do several reports quarterly, annually. We are set targets for each year, or we set targets along with the ministry, and if we want to give an incentive payment to our staff at the end of the year, then we must meet at least 80% of those targets. In our 16 years of operations, we have never failed. 100% of the revenue earned by the agency is from the fees provided, and these are kept, totally kept by the agency. Each year, we have to give the minister of finance or projections for revenue. If we earn more than those projections, we keep 50%, and 50% is given to the minister of finance. In some cases, we can apply to keep the full amount over our budget. The 90% of the fees are actually earned by the land registry, which we call the title's office. We also enhanced our revenues by creating new services, and this was as a result of the merged databases. We also divest lands for government by sale or lease. We don't keep those monies, but we keep 5% of those monies as a sort of service charge for that management. In 2003, we undertook a major business process review to change operations of the land registry from a totally manual system to an automated system. This also resulted in improving the linkages between our surveys and our title areas. All titles have now been scanned, also the majority of our supporting documents, and these are all available online. The documents are electronically signed, so that helps to improve the turnaround times for the process. We now have approximately 600,000 titles in the registry, plus the original documents, which includes transfers, mortgage documents, birth, marriage, death certificates, so we still have to maintain hard copies of those documents, even though we have them all online. So as you can imagine, storage is a major asset issue. There's a document tracking system, which allows persons to go online to see how long it will take for their documents to be completed and when it will be completed, because we found that people kept on calling the office. We have online forms, where they can go online and complete the forms, print them and present them to our office along with their supporting documentation. We offer a subscription service for something called Property Watch, where we can warn you if there is some kind of activity against your property. And most importantly, we designed a fee calculator, so you don't have to call us to find out how much should you pay. You don't need to come online or be in the office to find out how much you should pay, so that helped a lot with our customer service. I've highlighted just three services and tracked their delivery times, and you'll see that it's pre-2001, as of December 2016 and in 2008, nine, about eight years after the agency started. Generally, there has been a marked improvement in turnaround time of the services provided. Some matters we can do in 24 hours, some matters, and that's at an additional cost, and some matters we do for two days, in two days, but at no additional cost. In November 2001, when we were going through the major changes of creating the agency and putting it in place, the customer service index, which was measured by an outside person, was 2.9 out of 10. When we looked at it again in March 2005, it had increased to 8.1 out of 10. The merger allowed us to create new services because of the huge amount of data no available in one place. So, Elan Jamaica Service is an online service, it's a paid service, where you can look at your title or the supporting documents or the plans, and you can print them at your leisure. Whereas the IMAP Jamaica is a free service and it's really maps, so you can look at the maps to search by street name, community names, coordinates, et cetera. We're currently working on having those two services mobile enabled. The agency has other achievements as a result of the merger, and one of those things is the map products that we can now produce. So we have, we can map anything, anything you want us to map, we will do it. We offer services to our developers that if you're doing a subdivision, we will do the splinter titles for you within 40 days. And this is a paid additional service. If not, it takes on average 150 days with the in and out of the documents. If we don't achieve the 40-day turnaround time, we pay about the expedition fee, but you still have to pay the normal fee. In 2010, we established a VRS reference network, Elan-wide, to improve the accuracy of our service, and this will ultimately help us to build our cadastral map of Jamaica. We established regional centers outside of Kingston because people don't want to come into the city all the time. So it appears we are doing something right because we have received several awards. One of them in 2008 was the Prime Minister's Award for Best Customer Service Agency, and in 2010 for the most innovative and creative public sector agency. But we did not go through these changes without learning some important things. Business process review is an important part of the change. It makes no sense to computerize or to digitize things that are manual processes which are out of date. So we have to keep on reworking to improve performance. Communication is extremely important. You have to ensure that the staff is on the same page with you, and we can't forget the customers. So newsletters, focus group meetings, meetings with unions, and you need to manage their expectations because everybody wants everything at day one. We also have to bear in mind that things will get worse before they get better. Be prepared for the brand new computer software you have invested in to not work quite the way it should on the first day that you open to the public. So delivery times for services will decrease, but it is important to just keep focusing and keep talking to the customers and telling them it will work. After we worked through all these issues with the delegated authority that the CEO know has, I need to tell you that autonomy is great. We can now plan, we can now save, we can become the masters of our own destiny and that is really important. It has helped us to grow as an agency and it has helped us to challenge ourselves to have new products and services. So we now have several services from which we earn revenue. Next steps, more change. The agency has received funding from the World Bank to carry out some studies towards the introduction of electronic titling, which it is expected will further reduce turnaround times and give some increased security to our title data. This of course will necessitate legislative changes to the Registration of Titles Act. We found that the traditional separation of agencies may have had administrative convenience, but it led to duplication of functions, a loss in the value of information and longer turnaround times to produce services. By combining the four departments, the agency combined the data sets, reworked some processes, created new products and services and drastically reduced the turnaround times for providing the services. We regularly have focus group meetings with our customers and review our business processes with a view to reducing turnaround times. And just as a side note, our customers, the most difficult ones, we try to ensure that they are on the focus group meeting so that they are a part of the process. We realize that the need to provide quality service to our customers will continue to drive the process of improvement. Or our motto, one agency, one goal. This was as a result of the need to let the staff understand that we're no longer working in silos, we're all working together for one goal. I thank you.