Ordnance Survey Ireland is to become an autonomous body and director Richard Kirwan believes, with its up-to-date technology, it is set to succeed, writes Ciaran Brennan.

When work on surveying Ireland was completed in 1846 at a scale of six inches to one mile, it was the first country in the world be mapped in such a detailed manner. The body responsible, Ordnance Survey Ireland, is proud of its long history of embracing innovation and technological change.

That ability will stand it in good stead this month when it will be established as an autonomous body, a move that will allow the organisation to develop its business on a commercial basis to meet the challenges of the rapidly expanding geographic information industry.

Mr Richard Kirwan is the man largely responsible for handling the transformation from a largely technical civil service department under the Department of Finance to a semi-state body dealing with commercial realities.

"The whole industry has changed quite significantly," he says. "There is a new emerging industry, the geographic information industry, and that is bringing more uses into play for our material. Equally, it is bringing in new technologies, new competitors and new customers. So, to meet the challenges and to ensure that our data could be used in the industry, we felt it was necessary to change the organisation."

As well as fulfilling its public service mandate to provide maps and data for the State, Ordnance Survey Ireland will, under its new mandate, be better prepared to develop services and products to meet the needs of the private and public sectors, according to Mr Kirwan.

For a body that is organising itself on a commercial basis, its 2000 annual report, the most recent available, is devoid of the figures one normally associates with a commercial entity. However, Mr Kirwan is not shy about divulging the state of its finances.

"Essentially it costs €18.5 million annually to run the organisation. Last year our revenues were €13 million, so there is a gap there but that gap has effectively been shrinking over the past five or six years. We've gone from a state where we were recovering about 25 per cent of our costs to now where we're covering more than 60 per cent of our costs and we see that increasing over the coming years," he says.

It does not take a mathematician to deduce that the body will run a substantial loss in the future unless it continues to receive Government subsidies to make up the shortfall in revenues.

"We have an agreement with the State and with the Department of Finance on a subsidy for what we term national interest products, because the State is obliged to have a mapping infrastructure. A lot of that may be uneconomic in the sense that in some counties, where there is not a huge population, to produce and sell maps in not viable.

"Nevertheless, those maps are needed for the administrative, legislative and economic well-being of the State, such as land registry. We will get a subsidy from the State to provide mapping in those uneconomic areas and it may very well be that that will continue for quite a long time because it may be impossible to commercially fund such work."

But he says the funding for such work will be handled separately from Ordnance Survey Ireland's commercial activities.

"Our national interest activities and our commercial interests will be separated totally, and individually accounted for. There will be no cross-subsidy between national interest mapping and any purely commercial venture that we take. We will have to fund from our own resources or borrowing any commercial activity we engage in. That is very clear and is covered in legislation," says Mr Kirwan.

Ordnance Survey Ireland's ability to embrace new technology and innovation has led to what Mr Kirwan calls a "quiet revolution" in the body over the past 20 years, which has allowed it to offer new products.

Since the 1970s, it has invested heavily in the new mapping technology, and Mr Kirwan says it is one of the most technologically advanced organisations of its kind in the world. As a result, digital products, as opposed to traditional paper map products, are now providing the main area of growth.

"We've had growth of 25 per cent in our digital sales over the past number of years. We see that growth continuing, maybe not at a 25 per cent per annum growth rate but we see it certainly continuing at the 10 to 15 per cent rate for the next number of years," he says.

As well as selling these digital products to local authorities, land registries, the Department of Agriculture for Common Agricultural Policies purposes, and the Central Statistics Office for census purposes, there is growing demand for the products from corporate customers such as architects, building contractors and consultant engineers as the building boom continues.

In its corporate work, Ordnance Survey Ireland is also targeting non-traditional customers such as banks and insurance companies.

"New customer bases such as banks, insurance companies and supermarkets want mapping for things like marketing and market analysis to see where the customers are, to see where they are selling and, more importantly, not selling. They are beginning to use our mapping in a digital form together with their own statistics to give them both visual and market information on what they should do."

Insurance companies are starting to use maps for risk-analysis work, he added.

Sales to private individuals for issues such as planning form the third strand of its business model, although it forms a much smaller part of overall revenues. Elsewhere, the sale of tourist maps stagnated last year due to the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the economic downturn, and is expected to remain only a small part of revenue generation into the future.

To reach out to customers, Ordnance Survey Ireland has established a network of agents at six regional offices - Cork, Ennis, Kilkenny, Longford, Sligo and Tuam - which have recently been connected by a high-speed, high-capacity system to the Dublin headquarters in the Phoenix Park. As a result, all offices have online access to the main databases, intranet and internet.

"Our initial concern is to get our corporate customers and our major customers online because the volumes they deal in are reasonably astronomical. The next phase will then will be to look at the private customer," he says.

Ordnance Survey Ireland's investment in technological infrastructure is dovetailing with the huge advances in computing and mobile phone delivery platforms, says Mr Kirwan.

"Something which hasn't taken off but which has potential is the use of maps in location-based services, where maps can be supplied on WAP or a mobile-type environment. At the touch of a button, you can find out where the local pizza parlour is or where the local tourist office is or where there is a suitable hotel to stay in."

The body has also developed a geodirectory in conjunction with An Post, which is essentially a national address database.

"A lot of the information is there. It is a question of developing that together with other people. We wouldn't see ourselves as the sole developer of services - we would provide components and we would see ourselves being in some kind of partnerships with others," says Mr Kirwan.

Such developments essentially mean the nature of work has changed radically for the 300 staff at the organisation. Reflecting the changes, a number of key senior management appointments have been made, including the recruitment of a human resource managerand a corporate services manager.

Even among the traditional map-making staff, the nature of work has changed. "Map-making now has no resemblance to 20 years ago, let alone 170 years ago," says Mr Kirwan.