It started in Murten – the goal is a Swiss e-government architecture

Switzerland wants an e-government architecture. This article explains why this project is so important. 

What it is about

The organisational IT maturity of the public sector is crucial for its efficiency. If the organisational IT maturity is low, many institutions cannot work efficiently, i.e. institutions in public administration, security authorities and the judiciary, infrastructure providers, public transport organisations, healthcare providers, schools and research institutes, cultural institutions, etc. 

If, on the other hand, organisational IT maturity is high, then it is at least possible for thee public actors to work efficiently. Whether they actually do so, however, still depends on whether they actually want to utilise the potential of IT and design their business processes accordingly. A high level of organisational IT maturity therefore does not gurantee efficiency, it only makes it possible. Without it, efficiency is impossible or is associated with intolerably high operational risks. 

Efficiency is measured by today’s possibilities, not by some absolute standard that remains constant over time. This makes sense because the risk of corruption caused by inefficiency also depends on the state of the art. Administration in Switzerland in 1850 was more complex than it is today – messages were handwritten and transported by horse – but its efficiency measured against the state of the art was high, so it was not a problem. Today, on the other hand, there are much better and rapidly developing technical possibilities, and if the processes do not utilise these, the administration will become increasingly inefficient compared to the possibilities. And inefficiency is always associated with a high probability of corruption in the long term. 

The same applies to control mechanisms: they should always be moderate, not too little, but not too much either (and in most cases less rather than more). And if the way of working changes, the controls must also change so that they continue to fulfil the requirement of being “moderate”. However, the interrelationships here are more complex (and no longer as easy to describe as in the case of efficiency – in other words, this would quickly become a whole book). 

Incidentally, it is irrelevant whether the organisations are privately or publicly owned. Rather, two aspects are decisive: 

1. Are the tasks complex? In other words, do the tasks require different areas of expertise and/or are they distributed among different players? (The “economic complexity” sends its regards.) 
2. Is client-related, institutionalised cooperation between different independent organisations important? (We say hello back to “economic complexity” and tell it cheekily: “You think too simply!”) 

The first aspect relates to internal organisational IT maturity, the second to cross-system maturity and is the real challenge. It is not enough for the organisation itself to become more efficient: Collaboration between organisations must also become more efficient. 

Maturity level models are therefore frequently used in specialist literature. The higher the maturity level, the more extensively IT must support collaboration. The first levels on the maturity ladder are achieved by enabling efficient local collaboration, the middle levels by enabling efficient organisation-wide collaboration and the highest levels by enabling both efficient and flexibly adaptable cross-organisational collaboration. The idea is that if we define a cross-organisational collaboration at the beginning of the week, it can go live the following week on Friday morning: legally checked, technically tested and with trained employees. Unimaginable? Perhaps, but in crises it must be possible in the same week, in exceptional cases even in a few hours. (But that presupposes that there are regular exercises) 

NOTE: Dear readers, in case you have noticed that we have not defined organisational IT maturity: The purpose of this is to focus on the big picture. That big picture refers to the maturity of the organisation with regard to the use of IT, or the degree to which the organisation is empowered to act professionally using digital tools. This is concretised in various maturity level models, including those provided by MIT research groups.  

But back to everyday life: in the healthcare sector, patients are at the centre of everything, and a large number of stakeholders have to work together around them. System-wide organisational IT maturity is therefore particularly important. In the protection and rescue sector, there is a much smaller circle of players, but they have to work particularly closely together because their clients are people whose lives, or at least their possessions, are in great danger. Organisational IT maturity is therefore important here, too. 

In the police and justice system, the client is society, which must be protected from crime. This requires many forms of co-operation, in processes and interventions. In public administration in general, Switzerland and the EU member states have committed to the once-only principle: People and organisations only have to disclose data once. This necessitates close cooperation between the various institutions, even in cases where, unlike the police and judiciary, there is no compelling public interest in cross-institutional cooperation. In this case, a high level of system-wide organisational IT maturity is virtually a sine qua non for the fulfilment of the once-only principle. 

However, a minimum level of cooperation is also required in the school system, as the clients are pupils, students and people in further education who attend different institutions in the course of their lives. Cooperation would even make sense in the theatre sector, although there – from Bern to Vienna – the freedom of art usually ends where people want to take the freedom to work efficiently or even find out who is responsible for a financial scandal. But that’s another topic. 

The problem

In all the fields mentioned, a fundamental distinction must be made between cooperation on a personal level – for example, people pick up the phone when problems arise – and cooperation on an institutional level. The latter increases fairness, reduces the influence of the personal inclinations of public sector employees (whether they want to co-operate or not) and severely limits the opportunities for corruption. 

The real challenge comes from the conflict between local optimisation and system-wide optimisation. If everyone wants the best IT for themselves, the result is bad IT for everyone. The fact that organisations have no interest in good IT does not reduce the problem. As a rule, this means that people there cling to pre-digital and semi-digital practices and want to keep their outdated IT systems at all costs. (Even if the organisations therefore need twice as many employees and have twice as high IT maintenance costs.) 

The solution

In order to achieve a high level of system-wide, organisational IT maturity, effective interoperability of IT systems is required. And this in turn requires, among other things, standardisation of the interfaces that can be used to dock onto the remote IT systems, respectively the remote business processes. Unfortunately, the wrong standardisation can become a block on the leg that prevents further development. What we therefore need is an architecture for the individual areas of the public sector that enables a constructive discourse on legally mandated standardisation. This would then create future-proof interoperability, which not only enables efficient collaboration across organisational boundaries, but can also be adapted to the new optimisation possibilities arising from technical progress with little effort in the future. 

What has happened so far

On 14 May 2025, the first Architecture Symposium of the Digital Administration Switzerland (DVS) took place at the Centre Löwenberg in Muntelier – organised by the Digital Transformation and ICT Steering Division (DTI) of the Federal Chancellery. Almost 120 participants discussed the architectural vision 2050, with Switzerland’s “chief architect”, Andreas Spichiger, introducing the topic and moderating the concluding panel discussion. The main part was made up of six workshops 

• Workshop “Data ecosystem” 
• “Trust & Identity” workshop 
• “Sovereignty and the Swiss Government Cloud” workshop 
• Workshop “How to transform my business into a networked administration” 
• Workshop “How much architecture do we need for AI?” 
• Workshop “Interoperable portals for digital government services” 

The results, presentations and photos of the events can be found at Digitale Verwaltung Schweiz | Architektursymposium, Muntelier. 

What will happen in the future

More articles on the topic will follow on Society Byte.

Save the date: The next Architecture Symposium will take place on 2 June 2026 in Zurich.