Life at RoS has been anything but dull over the last few weeks, with our work continuing apace. For me, the two highlights were the launch of ScotLIS last week and hosting the Registrars of Title Conference 2017 in Edinburgh.

ScotLIS, which was delivered on time and on budget – meeting ministerial targets – is a key component of Registers of Scotland’s digital transformation. It is an easy to use, map-based online land information service. Citizens, communities, professionals and businesses will be able to access comprehensive information about any piece of land or property in Scotland more easily than ever before. Less than a week since its launch, ScotLIS has already attracted over 5,000 citizen users and more than 1,000 business users. Hot on the heels of its launch, regulations were laid before parliament by Scottish Ministers moving us further towards making RoS a fully digital business. You can find out more about that here.

Those events alone were significant, but I also had the honour of welcoming over 80 delegates from across the globe into Scotland’s capital to share knowledge about our different land registers.

The Registrars of Title Conference (ROTC) takes place every year, bringing registration colleagues from across the world into one place to share and learn with and from each other. As well as being able to showcase the services that we are developing in Scotland, we, in turn, learnt about the E-alert service in Hong Kong, the current state of land registration in the USA, 3-D mapping in Singapore and block chain in Estonia and Sweden, to name just a handful of the topics covered.

For me, the conference summed up a part of what I consider to be Scotland’s role in the world in these changing times. While we were honoured to host our friends from across different national boundaries, and proud to share our achievements with them, we also came to the ROTC with open eyes, ears and minds, as we continue to work with our friends and colleagues to evolve the quality of services that our citizens, stakeholders, and partners, rightly expect and deserve.

The clocks may have just turned back as the winter draws in, but here at RoS, we have our focus firmly on the coming year, the future developments as we progress towards becoming a fully digital service by 2020, and the ways in which we can best respond to the needs of our customers. This year has given us much to think about, and I look forward to letting you know more about the next as our future unfolds.