Why the electronic land registry failed

Abstract

[Context and motivation] In 2009 Denmark got a compulsory IT system for Land Registration of ownership. It soon created a national disaster because selling houses and getting mortgages might take months, rather than a couple of days. In this period, house owners had to pay a much higher interest rate. [Question/problem] The press claimed it was yet another IT failure, but actually the IT system worked as intended. What was the real cause? [Principal ideas/results] The visible problem was overloaded staff in the Registry Office, but behind this were optimistic estimates of human performance, lack of usability, insufficient user interface requirements, unrealistic SOA requirements, immature risk analysis, and other factors. [Contribution] This paper shows details of the requirements, what went wrong, and what could have been done, e.g. early design of the user interface and giving the supplier more influence on the architecture. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.