Digital transformation in government: lessons from Ajudem.cat and Cercat

Catalan public administration (and Spanish government in general) has an enormous challenge with digitalisation. And I don't mean putting PDF forms on a website. I mean rethinking how public services reach citizens in a world where everyone carries a computer in their pocket but half the population can't complete an online procedure.

I've been lucky enough to work on two projects that taught me a lot about this: Ajudem.cat, winner of Hackovid 2020, and Cercat, a GovTech Catalunya finalist. Two very different projects with one thread in common: technology with a purpose. Let me tell you what I learnt.

Ajudem.cat: when the need can't wait

March 2020. Full lockdown. Thousands of older, vulnerable or isolated people who couldn't leave home even to buy food. At the same time, thousands of neighbours who wanted to help but didn't know how. The disconnect was brutal.

We took part in Hackovid, a hackathon run by the Catalan government during the pandemic, with a simple idea: a platform connecting people who needed help with volunteers in their own neighbourhood. Ajudem.cat let anyone post a request (buy food, go to the pharmacy, walk the dog) and a nearby neighbour could see it and step in.

We won. The project was covered by TV3, La Vanguardia and dozens of other outlets. But what struck me most wasn't the prize or the coverage. It was seeing hundreds of people registered and helping their neighbours within days. Technology had achieved what seemed impossible: coordinating neighbourhood solidarity at scale.

What I learnt from Ajudem.cat

• Speed matters. In a crisis, an imperfect solution today is worth more than a perfect one in three months. We built the platform in days, not months.
• Simplicity is everything. The older person who needed help couldn't navigate a complicated app. It had to be as easy as sending a message.
• Government can be agile. Hackovid proved that with political will and the right format, innovative solutions can appear in record time.
• Young teams bring a different energy. The team we put together was mostly young people who wanted to get things done, without the inertia of large organisations.

Cercat: AI in the service of citizens

If Ajudem.cat was an emergency response, Cercat was a more considered project. We entered GovTech Catalunya, a government initiative looking for innovative answers to public administration challenges. We made the final.

The challenge was specific: public services are hard to reach. There are hundreds of procedures, grants, subsidies and resources available to citizens, but finding what you need is almost impossible. Institutional websites are labyrinths, administrative language is incomprehensible to most people, and every body has its own structure.

Cercat used natural language processing to make all of that information reachable. The concept was simple: a citizen describes what they need in their own words ("I'm unemployed with two children, what support can I claim?") and the system returns the available options, explained in language they can understand, with the concrete steps to apply.

What I learnt from Cercat

• AI can be a great leveller. The people with the fewest digital resources are precisely the ones who most need public services. AI can remove the barrier of technical language and bureaucratic complexity.
• Public data is an underused treasure. There's an enormous amount of public information available that, properly structured and processed with AI, could transform the citizen experience.
• Public-private collaboration works. GovTech Catalunya is an excellent example of government opening the door to startups and founders to solve real problems.
• It takes patience. Public administration moves at a different rhythm from the private sector. Not better, not worse, different. You have to understand it and adapt.

The common lessons: technology with a purpose

If one thread connects Ajudem.cat and Cercat, it's the conviction that technology has to serve a clear purpose. It's not about digitalising for the sake of it, or deploying AI because it's fashionable. It's about identifying a real problem faced by real people and using technology to solve it.

The lessons I take away are clear:

1. Always start with the problem, never with the technology. The question isn't "how can we use AI?" but "what problem do citizens have, and what's the best way to solve it?"
2. Multidisciplinary teams make the difference. In both projects, the key was having people who understood technology and people who understood human needs. Neither group alone could have built the solution.
3. Prototype fast, validate with real users. In both Ajudem.cat and Cercat we put the solution in front of real users as soon as we could. Real feedback is worth a thousand theoretical studies.
4. Government needs more founders. Not to privatise it, but to bring the agility, experimentation and results focus that startups live by.

The future: more AI, less bureaucracy

I look ahead with optimism. There's growing awareness inside public administration that things have to change. Programmes like GovTech Catalunya, and the work of the Open Administration of Catalonia, are opening doors that were shut five years ago.

Imagine an administration where you don't need to know which procedure you need because the system works it out. Where you don't fill in forms with data the government already holds. Where you can handle anything from your phone, in your language, at your pace. That isn't science fiction. The technology already exists. What's missing is will, investment and the right teams to build it.

Digital transformation in government isn't a technology project. It's a project about people, for people.

And that's where I think profiles like mine add value: connecting the world of technology with citizens' real needs and what the administration can actually do. Being a bridge between worlds that too often don't talk to each other.