Special report - BT project rings the changes. A British Telecom project has revolutionised land registry information management in Northern Ireland. Mark Chillingworth checked it out.

Today, Northern Ireland is a place of major change, whether it is the IRA decommissioning its weapons or its booming economy. The rapid pace is forcing government agencies to embrace change, and that means delivering information online.

Land Registers of Northern Ireland (LRNI) is the Ulster government agency that retains all written legal records on land ownership and exchange. As Northern Ireland enters a new era of peace, its economy and property prices are booming, and LRNI has had to embrace the internet to meet these demands.

Its Landweb internet service provides legal professionals with instant access to legal documents and maps.

LRNI set out to improve the services it offered and make the wealth of information it holds easily available. Alongside partners British Telecom, LRNI has aimed to deliver material online, and radically change the land registration processes in Ulster with a new First Registration document - a single document of land registration.

Prior to First Registration, each piece of land came with a complex "box load" of deeds and legal documents, said Patricia Montgomery, chief executive of LRNI. First Registration has sped up the process of land exchanges.

The Landweb project has moved LRNI away from paper dependency and towards an electronic database of text and map information accessible by a portal. LRNI workers can now electronically update maps and content. Registered users are able to access information regarding the ownership of land and download it.

"Delivering the business benefits to users was always the starting point of this project," said Graham Anderson, a BT business analyst closely involved with the project. "We knew we had to develop a system that the public could operate," Montgomery said of making Landweb universally available.