3.4 The lifecycle for addresses and data management

3.4.1 Address creation

The interest of each of the Acacia partners starts at a different point in the address creation process. This is shown in Table 3. Other address users are also interested in addresses across the range of stages.

Table 3 Interest in the address creation process

The different points in the address lifecycle at which the various partners interest commences, means that it is very difficult if not impossible to keep their different address datasets synchronised.

3.4.2 Address change

Change to addresses can occur in many ways. Some of these changes will be corrections rather than real-world changes, for example the correction of spelling in a recorded address.

The main types of address change are:

• of name or number,
• of classification (e.g. from residential to commercial),
• of use,
• of owner,
• of occupancy,
• of recorded position (e.g. due to positional accuracy improvement),
• of postcode.

The interest of each Acacia partner in each type of change is shown in Table 4.

Table 4. Interest of Acacia partners in address changes

3.4.3 Address deletion

When an object is de-commissioned, most organisations archive the address details, as they will have an influence on future developments. The exception is Royal Mail, who only keep a record of current postal addresses.

3.5 Proposed management model

3.5.1 Governance

To be effective, the infrastructure will require direction, regulation and monitoring from the centre, by a government body independent of the data suppliers but working closely in partnership with them. This body should have ownership of the infrastructure and be part of (or directly accountable to) a government department with a remit across a range of areas.

The data suppliers will need to be obliged, subject to national agreements on the commercial arrangements, to supply data to the national infrastructure and other partner suppliers.

The data suppliers are mostly key users of the data as well. The other main users will be other central government departments and agencies, emergency services, utilities and commercial organisations. These will need to be consulted on a regular basis through a wider user group.

3.5.2 Management

In order for the joined-up infrastructure to be successful, it will have to be actively managed. Leaving things to the individual partners on a goodwill basis will not be sufficient. Roles and responsibilities will need to be defined.

An Implementation Authority, at the organisational level, will be required to manage the infrastructure. They will be responsible for day-to-day monitoring of the update processes and data quality control. They will carry out any data matching between the source datasets, and ensure that change information is disseminated to the partners.

3.5.3 Business processes

In the longer-term, the update process needs to be re-engineered, to remove the current duplication. Each task should be performed by a single organisation, and sent to a central facility for dissemination. A simplified process is shown in figure 8.

Figure 8. Idealised update process.

The introduction of a National Address Infrastructure may necessitate the re-engineering of the address creation processes and traditional roles and responsibilities for certain Acacia stakeholders.

The responsibility for each aspect might be as follows:

In the shorter term, there will still be multiple sources of change that have to be resolved. The resolution could be achieved using the responsibilities listed above.