As part of the day NTT Synthphony Impulse Operational Excellence 2030, the director of the AOC, Miquel Estape, has shared the roadmap on the future of public administrations. The message is clear: although the public sector is today “highly digitalized”, digitalization alone does not guarantee greater efficiency or greater resilience. For Estapé, the great challenge of the next decade is to overcome the trap of digital bureaucracy and move towards a transformation that generates real public value.
Digitizing is not transforming
According to the director of the AOC, too often the administration has limited digitalization to moving processes designed for paper to the electronic environment. Despite having tools such as electronic signature, invoicing or notification, many key processes remain rigid, slow and not very user-centered.
Estapé argues that real transformation requires courageous leadership, the ability to take risks, and new forms of organization and management based on agile and innovative methodologies. The goal is not to do the same in digital, but to rethink and redesign services from scratch.
The value of shared platforms
One of the central themes of the presentation was the role of the AOC as a shared digital infrastructure. In an ecosystem where most Catalan administrations are micro-organizations, operating individually is unfeasible due to both cost and complexity.
Miquel Estapé highlighted that the AOC manages more than 30 common services for nearly 2.000 entities, with 2,5 million daily operations and an annual growth of 15%. This economy of scale generates great efficiencies and savings, and makes possible success stories such as all Catalan administrations providing a chatbot for user service, based on generative AI technology, which has allowed the number of people served to be tripled, reducing the cost per interaction.
Data, interoperability and ethical governance
For Estapé, data is the key strategic asset to reduce bureaucracy and friction. With more than 90 million data exchanges annually, Catalonia already saves millions of unnecessary procedures, but the future involves moving towards the governance of data held by the Administration, as well as facilitating access to data of public value that today is largely in private hands.
At the same time, the director has warned of the risks of implementing algorithms and automation without guarantees. For this reason, the AOC is committed to reports of transparència algorithmic, intensive human supervision and audit mechanisms that ensure that no automated decision violates fundamental rights, learning from international lessons derived from systemic failures in digital public services.
Talent as a driver of change
Operational excellence towards 2030 will depend less on process-oriented profiles and more on systems and service architects. Estapé stresses that the public sector needs transformative profiles: specialists in user experience, clear language, administrative simplification, knowledge extraction from data and pragmatic and efficient regulatory alternatives.
Horizon 2030: towards a proactive administration
The vision of the future culminates in the concept of an administration of “invisible processes” where citizens enjoy public services in a natural and simple way, without the need to know how the Administration works or the distribution of competences. Inspired by leading models such as Estonia, the goal is an administration that, with the consent of the citizen, is capable of detecting needs and activating services or aid automatically and proactively.
This “Agentic administration” would allow to minimize phenomena such as “"non-take-up" —people who do not receive aid due to bureaucratic complexity—, generating significant management savings and, above all, strengthening citizens' trust in public institutions.
