Registers of Scotland: paper to digital in three weeks
Registers of Scotland is the oldest national public land register in the world. In March 2020 it was locked out of its own paper. Here is what happened next, and what actually did it.
- Rebuilt in
- 3 weeks
- Digital submissions
- 38% to 94%
- Complex casework
- 18 months to under 30 days
end to end, work ten years of plans had written off
inside a year, with staff working from home across the country
after a move to cross-functional teams made before the crisis, and nobody worked harder or longer
Palo Alto Networks published a customer case study of its own in March 2023. It covers the three weeks and the 38 per cent to 94 per cent rise.
The record of who owns what across the whole of Scotland lived on paper, floors of it. A single title was a sheaf of documents added to, split and amended by hand over decades, held by people whose whole craft was knowing where in that paper a thing belonged.
There were two kinds of expert on that floor, and they did not do each other's jobs. Legal experts read the words, the burdens and conditions written in the careful language of conveyancing. Mapping experts drew the ground, the lines that said this hedge and not that one. A case moved between them the way it had moved for generations, team to team, grade to grade, waiting in a queue at every handoff. The waiting was measured in weeks, sometimes years. One class of work took eighteen months on average to reach the register.
Going digital had been asked for by many people for at least ten years. It had been planned, costed, tendered for, withdrawn, replanned and abandoned again. The prevailing view was that it was too complex, too expensive and too risky, so it was set aside again.
Then the weekend of the 21st and 22nd of March 2020 arrived. I had a ticket for the first train to Edinburgh on the Monday morning. All that weekend we had watched lockdowns spread across Europe. On the Sunday the trains were cancelled. On the Monday I tried for a hire car, and there was none to be had. The stay-at-home lockdown started, and everyone at Registers of Scotland went home. The files stayed on the shelves.
You cannot post the oldest land registry in the world to people's spare rooms. Most staff had no work laptop and no business phone, and very few had ever made a video call. Every house sale waiting on a search, every family part-way to moving home, all of it ran through paper that nobody could now reach. Either it got working again, or the Scottish housing market would grind to a stop.
There was no plan, and every existing plan was dead. So people improvised, and I was one of them. The goal everyone lined up behind was simple: make this work.
Industrial scanners came into the offices and ran around the clock, turning the binders into files one page at a time. Laptops were boxed and posted to homes all over the country. Actual letters went out with joining instructions, because a good number of the people we needed had never used the tools we were now asking them to work with. People opened Microsoft Teams for the first time in their lives that month to do a job that had been done on paper since before the tools existed. I sat at home working out the workflow: how a legal expert at home and a mapping expert two towns away could open and work the same case without ever being in the same room.
It took three weeks to get it running end to end. That was work that had been written off as too complex, done with no precedent and a workforce using tools they had never touched.
In the early days, a legal expert worked a case from home on a brand-new laptop, following a printed letter that told her which button to press first, for the first time in a career spent turning the pages of a physical title. Two towns away, a mapping expert she had never met opened the same case on his own screen. With no corridor, no binder and nobody in the building to ask, they worked it out between them. On the calls you would hear "you're on mute" a dozen times a day. It was rough, but it kept the country's housing market moving.
Within a year, digital submissions went from 38 per cent to 94 per cent. The deeper change had started before the crisis, when the registry moved its complex casework to cross-functional teams: cases that used to take eighteen months began finishing in under thirty days. In those teams, junior staff had been taking on cases that would once have gone straight up the grades, with real training and pointers from hugely experienced experts in the same team. And the part that matters most: nobody worked harder or longer.
So what actually did it? It was not the scanners, clever as some were, and it was not the workflow. The old structure had told everyone who they needed to talk to, and the handoffs ran one way along a line drawn long ago. When that structure collapsed, what grew back was a network instead. A mapping expert, a developer and someone from operations would be on the same call, working out in twenty minutes what used to take a corridor and two weeks. Decisions that used to travel off to someone and come back were just made, by whoever was close enough to see the problem.
Another change was what people could suddenly see of each other. On paper, you only saw a case when it landed in your queue, never the hands it had passed through to reach you. Now the work was live on a shared screen, and people who had never had reason to speak were inventing the new way of working as they went.
What this says for any organisation
Three things carried it, and none was extra effort. Conditions changed for everyone at once, so nobody waited on a memo to start. The moves were small, and each was visible to the people who needed to see it, so the fixes found each other and joined up. And decisions were made where the facts were: the person who could see the work was the person who got to decide.
That is the pattern worth taking from this. When your own way of working next gets taken apart, and one day it will, the temptation is to reach for a bigger plan and more hands. What moved a centuries-old institution in three weeks was the opposite: letting the people closest to the work see each other and act, and getting the decision out of the queue and into the room where the facts already were. The capability was never something the institution owned and kept on a shelf. It was what people could do while they were connected like this, and it lasted only as long as those connections did.
This is what we do with organisations. We find where the decisions actually live, move them closer to the people who hold the facts, and set conditions the change can grow under, so the improvement keeps running once we are gone. If your own way of working is fighting the work it was meant to help, that is the conversation to have. See how we work, or the ways to work with us.
This is also the argument of the book. Omnicomplexity follows it through real stories, all the way to what to do on Monday.