Department of Justice and Attorney-General

Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages
Queensland, Australia

The population of the Australian state of Queensland is 3.6 million. In 1996, the Queensland Registry chose KE Software to customise and implement an existing system to suit the Registry’s specific needs. Today, some 6 million records, dating back to the first European settlement of Queensland in the early 1800s, are accessed by 50 concurrent users.

KE Software has allowed the Registry to move away from a costly and inflexible mainframe system to one which is relatively simple to operate, modify and maintain.

It has very powerful text retrieval properties and has improved the Registry’s ability to locate obscure registrations without extensive manual effort. Together with a combined records and receipting system, currently being developed by KE Software, it will be the answer to the Registry’s projected business systems in the 21st century.

Desmond Tanner
(Former) Registrar General

The Queensland Registry is unique in Australia in that some of its services are offered through district registrars and Government agents who are located throughout the state. The Registry produces paper registrations and indexes for all of its 35 districts. This enables each district registrar to produce birth and death certificates of local events on demand.

The Registry is currently in the process of creating electronic index data and is planning to image some of its historic registrations. This will enable the Registry to begin exploring new business opportunities via the World Wide Web, such as online certificate validation and online ordering of historic certificates. These services are currently being offered in other Australian states being serviced by KE Software.

Each year, the Registry processes 120,000 applications, produces 160,000 certificates and registers 90,000 vital events.

Productivity

Since installation in 1996:

• Processing times have decreased from an average of two days to about two minutes for over-the-counter applications, and same day dispatch for mail if required.
• Full cost recovery was achieved in 2.5 years.
• System uptime during core business hours is 99%.

Services

The Registry has also been able to offer many advanced services including:

• Electronic data matching of birth and death information for customers.
• Improved querying and searching facilities.
• Improved ad-hoc reporting facilities.
• Automatic data matching of birth registrations with hospital notifications - currently 55% of notifications are captured electronically from hospitals.

Certificates

Of the certificates issued each year:

• 130,000 are official certificates.
• 30,000 are commemorative certificates in 6 different designs.
• 60% of parents purchase a certificate package, i.e. an official certificate plus a commemorative certificate.