The city of Girona hosted COMTIC 2026, the benchmark event for ICT professionals in Catalonia's local sector. The event brought together more than 300 people over two days dedicated to debate, learning, and the exchange of experiences on the major challenges of digital transformation in public administrations.
COMTIC has established itself as a crucial space for technology managers, executives, secretaries, and treasurers of municipalities, united by the goal of fostering more efficient, innovative administrations capable of generating public value. In this context, Miquel Estapé, director of the AOC, presented the progress achieved during 2026 and the strategic priorities for 2027, emphasizing how technology can serve a simpler, more secure, and citizen-centric local administration.
The new statutes of the AOC, planned for 2027, aim to strengthen the local sector's role in governance, update the entity's mission, and establish a co-financing system to ensure service sustainability. Despite the good level of digitalization achieved in the Catalan public sector, the current challenge is to leverage technology to generate savings, eliminate low-value tasks, and shorten timelines for procedures such as licenses or personnel management. It is estimated that electronic notification could significantly reduce the 90 million euros annually spent on postal notifications.
Transformation also involves moving towards an integrated citizen-centric approach with personalized and proactive services. The Via Oberta platform, which allows consultation of data already provided by citizens, only utilizes 20% of its potential. To improve its use, the AOC proposes four levers: standardized authorizations, a single request to manage them, better integration with case managers, and the promotion of meta-queries.
The idCAT digital wallet, in beta version, is central to the new digital identity, with an estimated annual saving of 2 million euros in SMS and the migration of 6 million users from La Meva Salut. The goal for 2027 is to deploy the cloud-based certificate. The AOC also promotes the Xarxa de Governs Intel·ligents (Smart Governments Network) and business intelligence (BI) and AI-as-a-service solutions, in collaboration with the provincial councils and Localret.
Security is fundamental for trust in digital services. The AOC has 24 services certified according to the National Security Scheme and is working on business continuity and cloud backups. Furthermore, it promotes digital sovereignty for the local sector through public hosting, data and document governance, an integration layer, and a public functional core, in collaboration with the four provincial councils and Localret.
The COMTIC Girona 2026 Declaration, continuing that of 2025, proposes aligning legal security, resource management, organizational transformation, and technological capacity. It calls for an alliance between management, legal, economic, and technological profiles for the deployment of responsible artificial intelligence and sovereign data governance.
The event suggests that local entities should allocate 4% of their municipal budget to technology and digital transformation. The Taula TIC del món local (Local ICT Table), established in 2026, is intended to become an effective capacity for joint work, with a shared agenda, concrete priorities, and progress monitoring. The declaration proposes reaching the 2027 edition with a shared methodology for measuring technological effort and generated public value.
COMTIC demonstrates that digital transformation is a collective project requiring vision, talent, resources, and institutional cooperation, turning common needs into useful solutions for citizens.
