Government digital transformation is stalling but not for a lack of ambition. Across municipalities, regions and national agencies, strategies are in place, funding is allocated and expectations from citizens continue to rise. Yet results remain uneven.
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), "the public sector needs to be “digital by design” to fully adapt to and reap the benefits of the digital age".
Despite years of investment, many digital government initiatives struggle to scale beyond pilots, deliver consistent services across organizational boundaries or fully replace manual processes.
The root cause is rarely strategy or technology choice, but integration.
Unlike most private-sector transformations, government services rarely sit within a single organization. A single citizen journey may span:
Municipal services
Regional authorities
National agencies
Healthcare, education, social services and infrastructure
This makes government digitalization fundamentally a coordination challenge.
Data must move securely and reliably across organizational, legal and technical boundaries. When it does not, even well-designed digital services break down in practice.
Studies from McKinsey, BCG and national audit bodies consistently point to structural issues rather than execution errors when it comes to digital transformation falling short of its goals.
Many government organizations still rely on systems that are 20–30 years old, originally designed for siloed, departmental use. These systems were never intended to support cross-agency data sharing, real-time services or modern security requirements.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), for example, has shown that the majority of government IT budgets are spent maintaining legacy systems, leaving limited capacity for modernization.
Over decades, municipalities and agencies have accumulated large portfolios of systems:
Different solutions per department or service area
Separate platforms for finance, HR, healthcare, education, logistics
Integrations added incrementally as point-to-point connections
The result is an IT landscape that few fully understand end to end.
A common refrain among public-sector IT leaders is:
“We no longer know exactly how our data flows work.”
What the public sector says about Frends? "We needed an API layer for our digitalization needs and at the same time, we wanted to take control of integration development and create order and structure." - Claes Öster, IT Manager at Höglandets IT, which serves several municipalities in Sweden.
Public services depend on information sharing:
Between municipalities
Between regions and municipalities
Between government agencies
In practice, differences in data models, legal interpretations and technical standards make interoperability difficult.
The consequence:
Manual handovers
Duplicate data entry
Delays in service delivery
Lower service quality for citizens
The data often exists, but not where or when it is needed.
Government organizations operate under strict regulatory frameworks, including:
GDPR
NIS2
Sector-specific legislation (e.g. healthcare and social services laws)
At the same time, the cyber threat landscape is intensifying, and accountability is often split between IT, operations and legal functions.
This creates a familiar dilemma:
“We want to share data, but are we allowed to?”
Without clear visibility and governance, caution turns into inertia.
In many municipalities and agencies, ownership of integration and data flows is unclear:
Who owns integrations?
Who governs APIs and data models?
Who decides what should scale and what should stop?
Parallel initiatives across IT, digitalization teams and business units often lead to duplication rather than progress.
Everyone is acting with good intentions, but in different directions.
Modern government services require expertise in:
Integration architecture
Cybersecurity
Hybrid and sovereign cloud environments
Public-sector organizations often struggle to recruit and retain these skills, leading to heavy reliance on external consultants.
A recurring risk emerges:
“When the consultant leaves, no one really knows how it works.”
Taken together, these challenges converge at one point: integration.
Many government IT landscapes are held together by a combination of:
Custom code
Point-to-point connections
Undocumented scripts
This creates brittle dependencies, limited transparency and high operational risk. Every change becomes expensive and slow.
In regulated environments, this lack of visibility is no longer acceptable.
Modern government operations require:
Full auditability
Data sovereignty
Clear accountability
Explainable decision-making
With regulations such as GDPR, NIS2 and the upcoming EU AI Act, automation and AI-enabled processes in the public sector must be transparent by design.
Insights from the Agentic AI in Government & Public Sector whitepaper underline this clearly:
AI-assisted and autonomous systems cannot be deployed safely without a governed, observable integration layer. Automation without transparency does not scale and it does not comply.
This applies, of course, to future AI use cases, but also to today’s digital services.
Leading municipalities and agencies are not attempting large-scale “rip-and-replace” programs. Instead, they are modernizing around existing systems by introducing structured integration layers.
Visual, low-code transparency
Standardized process modeling (e.g. BPMN 2.0) makes data flows explicit and self-documenting — supporting both operations and audits.
Hybrid and sovereign deployment models
Sensitive data can remain on-premises or in sovereign environments, while digital services are delivered securely via APIs.
Incremental modernization with lower risk
Reusable integrations reduce maintenance costs and allow new services to be delivered step by step, rather than through multi-year transformation programs.
Integration acts, more and more, as the coordination infrastructure. A well-designed integration layer allows governments to:
Connect departments without centralizing all data
Automate services while retaining human oversight
Respond to policy and regulatory changes without rebuilding systems
Municipalities across Europe have demonstrated that this approach:
Reduces manual work
Improves service quality
Strengthens compliance and security
AI in government will not arrive as a single, sweeping transformation. As outlined in the Agentic AI whitepaper, it will emerge gradually through narrow, governed use cases such as:
Case handling and triage
Permit processing
Internal administrative automation
Crucially, these use cases depend on:
Event-driven integration
Clear process ownership
Human-in-the-loop controls
Without a modern integration foundation, AI initiatives will remain stuck in pilots.
The challenges facing municipalities and government agencies are not unique, but the constraints they operate under are. Any integration platform intended for the public sector must work with legacy systems, strict regulation and limited capacity.
This is where Frends fits the public sector context particularly well.
Frends is designed for environments where core systems cannot simply be replaced. It allows governments to modernize around existing platforms by creating structured, reusable integrations that reduce dependency on brittle point-to-point connections.
This enables incremental progress rather than high-risk transformation programs.
Public sector organizations need to understand and explain how data moves across systems. Frends uses visual, standards-based process modeling (such as BPMN 2.0), making integrations explicit, documented, and auditable.
This supports:
Regulatory compliance
Clear ownership of data flows
Easier collaboration between IT, operations, and legal teams
Transparency is not an add-on—it is part of the operating model.
Data sovereignty is non-negotiable in government environments. Frends supports hybrid and on-premises execution models, allowing sensitive data to remain within controlled environments while still enabling modern digital services and APIs.
This makes it possible to balance innovation with security and regulatory obligations.
By standardizing and visualizing integrations, Frends reduces reliance on undocumented custom code and individual specialists. Knowledge moves from individual consultants into shared structures, lowering long-term risk and improving continuity.
This is particularly important in organizations facing skills shortages and high external dependency.
As public sector organizations gradually introduce more automation — and, over time, AI-assisted processes —, Frends provides the governed integration layer required for safe adoption.
Automation and AI in government demand:
Clear process boundaries
Full traceability
Human oversight
Frends helps ensure initiatives and projects can scale responsibly.
Public sector digital transformation requires order, visibility and control across the systems already in place.
By addressing integration as shared infrastructure, rather than a collection of tactical fixes, Frends helps municipalities and government agencies move from fragmented digital efforts to coordinated, trustworthy public services.
That is how digital transformation becomes sustainable.
Government digital transformation stalls because legacy integration cannot support transparency, coordination and change.
By modernizing integration first — rather than replacing systems — municipalities and agencies can:
Extend the life of existing investments
Deliver better digital services
Meet security and compliance requirements
Prepare responsibly for automation and AI
Before governments add more systems, they need order, visibility and control over what they already have.
Integration is where that work begins.