The Danish courts process about 220.000 criminal cases annually, divided into 30 different types of cases. Criminal cases are characterized by categories ranging from very simple fine cases, such as speeding tickets to very complex and lengthy cases that require jury trials. “The Criminal and Probate Program” is a program organised by the Danish Court Administration.
The oldest parts of the platform of the IT systems are from 1989 and are, as a result, being challenged by technical debt and limited lifespan, as few people can maintain and further develop them. The IT systems are also insufficient in relation to current and upcoming digital business needs, and they thus constitute a barrier to realizing potential digitization gains.
One of the new systems in the program covers the process for collecting claims and debts for an estate in Denmark. Caseworkers had to go through a very time consuming and manual registration of all claims based on received letters, emails and phone calls. This lengthy and error-prone process is not fit for the 21st century.
To solve those challenges, Nine/Trifork helped build the Probate Portal (in Danish: MinSkifteSag), which handles all estates in Denmark. Instead of just adding a new digital channel to submit claims, the user journey and the legislation was re-engineered. The law has been rewritten, mandating that all claims must be submitted digitally. This resulted in a unified process, where data quality and accuracy were improved dramatically. A big effort was made to ensure easy integration for API users.
It took nine months for the solution to be built and implemented. There were a lot of strict security policies, and the organisation had to adapt the new legislative processes. Nine has had several roles (as advisor and executor) in almost all aspects of the project. Our responsibilities included:
From the start of the project, there was a heavy focus on using tooling and automation to develop faster. By embracing principles such as:
The solution was able to evolve quickly and with confidence. State-of-the-art tooling was used wherever relevant to ensure higher productivity and quality. The initial investment in setting up the tooling gave a great return. All these measures have made it easy to ramp up because new developers can be onboarded in no time. Also future development projects in the program will benefit from this investment.
“After more than two years of analysis, roadmap planning, architecting, developing and other preparations, I’m incredibly proud of seeing the first wave of functionality in the programme finally going live and being so well received by users, both internal and external, as well as public and private sector API-consumers. This has only been possible with very close cooperation with the courts and great teamwork within the team.”
The Probate Portal was the first step on the voyage from legacy systems on end-of-life platforms to modern, user-friendly digital solutions built using best practices and a focus on quality and maintainability.
The Probate Portal is the first of Nine/Trifork’s many releases for the Danish Court Administration. It has proven that the allocated team from both the customer and several vendors are able to deliver together as one team. Within the first two months almost 12,000 estates and 19,000 claims have been created through the courts’ new Probate Portal.
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