Sole developer · 2020
Norsk Koronamonitor
Automated COVID phone survey system
THE CHALLENGE
Norway locked down. Population-scale data needed immediately.
Norway locked down on March 12, 2020. Opinion AS needed population-level survey data immediately — to understand how Norwegians were responding to the pandemic, what they were doing, and how attitudes were shifting in real time.
Traditional survey methods were too slow. An automated phone survey system could run 24 hours a day, reach a representative sample without human operators, and produce daily data from day one.
3 days
Delivery window
Zero
Existing IVR infrastructure
Day 1
Production-ready from launch
THE SOLUTION
A fully automated phone survey — built and deployed in 3 days.
An automated phone dialing system using IVR (Interactive Voice Response) with DTMF touch-tone input. No human operators needed. The system called respondents, played recorded questions, captured keypad responses, and stored results — fully automated from end to end.
The entire system — dialing, recording, response capture, data pipeline, and reporting — was built and deployed in 3 days. It ran continuously for years after launch, producing daily survey data on Norwegian attitudes throughout the pandemic.
The constraint sharpened the scope. There was no time for over-engineering — every decision had to serve the goal of getting reliable data flowing within 72 hours. The architecture was simple enough to be understood, debugged, and operated by one person under pressure.
KEY NUMBERS
3 days
From commission to production
700/day
Interviews conducted daily
Years
Continuous production use
TECH STACK
REFERENCES
The data the system produced was valuable enough to be cited in NRK reporting and referenced in the Norwegian government's official COVID review commission report, NOU 2022:5.