In an event held at the end of 2024, OutSystems One, OutSystems identified the three main “imperatives” for Information Systems (IS) today. In other words, these were the three major expectations that organizations and management have for their IS teams: agility, cost reduction, and innovation, particularly concerning the use of AI. These imperatives served as the foundation for positioning the OutSystems platform as the best solution for current challenges. They also prompted my own reflection on the platform’s applicability to the reality of Public Administration in Portugal.
First and foremost, it’s crucial to understand if these imperatives apply to Public Administration in the same way they seem clear for the private sector. In the private sector, competition, the need to adapt quickly to changing contexts (whether technological, commercial, or geopolitical), cost reduction to increase the attractiveness of products and services, and constant innovation—not only to create new products/services but also to meet the expectations of increasingly informed and demanding consumers—all seem to confirm the listed imperatives.
However, Public Administration isn’t in competition. Instead, its goals revolve around serving the citizen, and this should be the primary focus of its operations. We could say that while it’s not competing, it does contend with citizen expectations. And citizens, with their dual persona of citizen/consumer, have increasingly high expectations for the services they receive, whether public or private. Being aware of available technology and accustomed to interacting with private service providers through various highly efficient channels, it’s natural for them to transfer that experience to demanding public services of the same caliber.
It’s not just citizens putting pressure on the Information Systems of Public Administration. The government itself, aiming to fulfill its governing program (a commitment made to all citizens), rapidly creates and alters public processes and services. It tries to bring about these changes within the limited timeframe it’s been mandated for. It’s worth noting that governments don’t always fulfil their mandates in full, with some administrations being in charge for less than a year. It’s understandable that any service changes and subsequent technological implementation of new applications or systems must happen very quickly, otherwise they might not be effective within the current governmental cycle. It’s not unusual, for example, to see decree-laws taking effect in 30 days, which would be very difficult (or even impossible) to meet given the combined time for public procurement and the implementation of an Information Systems project. It’s somewhat paradoxical to think that information systems could actually become the primary obstacle to the evolution of public services, by severely limiting the speed of their implementation (regardless, of course, of all the subsequent advantages). It would likely be faster to simply print a document and launch a new service without digital support.
And it’s this paradox that must be addressed. This requires shorter development cycles, with rapid (if not instantaneous) prototyping, supported by the possibilities of GenAI, and agile interaction, ensuring the retention of know-how in clear, readable, and self-documented “code.” Development platforms/frameworks must ensure integration with all existing information sources, support technological innovation (including, for example, software generation with Gen AI and the integration of AI Agents), all user devices, and simplify software lifecycle management, centralizing DevOps, testing, security, and compliance in the simplest way possible. These are the premises of the OutSystems platform, recognized by leading international analysts as a leader in enterprise Low Code platforms.
Only with this approach will Public Administration be able to respond quickly to the country’s governance needs, simultaneously ensuring the delivery of quality software and meeting citizen expectations. Other advantages include the possibility of replacing all legacy systems (whose maintenance costs increase over time, as do integration difficulties with other systems), know-how retention (making code more readable and accessible to everyone and minimizing the risk associated with losing technical resources), and the possibility of sharing code between organizations and/or society, reducing the financial cost and implementation time of new services.
OutSystems is the leading Low Code platform, and I believe it can also be one of the primary levers for modernizing the country’s public services.