The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture has awarded Altia a contract worth 1,215,630 euros for the full overhaul of its online platform and the horizontal applications and services supporting it. The project will further the Ministry’s digital transformation process with a range of e-government improvements, both in terms of the technological architecture and the services associated with the platform.

The Ministry’s online platform – known as ‘Sede Electronica’ – is a highly critical system that allows citizens and businesses to submit applications for various types of aid. All these are highly demanding and require immediate response times. In order to continue its digital transformation and ensure the platform is in full working order for all potential users, the Ministry has entrusted Altia with this new project, under a deadline of two years, extendable by another two years.

Altia will be in charge of corrective and adaptive maintenance of the e-government architecture, implementing new features in the online platform, as well as developing various e-government applications and services throughout this two-year implementation period. The technology consulting company will also take care of integration with the common services of the Spanish Government’s General Secretariat for Digital Administration (SGAD) and other external systems, as well as supporting the integration of third parties with the e-government infrastructure.

The main elements of the Ministry’s technological architecture within the scope of the project are: the Sede Electrónica online platform, which allows citizens and businesses to submit applications and queries about applications made; the Internal and External Applications Portals and the Administration Portal. The Ministry has a centralised framework to access business applications (running on J2EE) so as to unify the look and feel of applications, manage and reuse components through their interfaces, and use shared screens. To improve user experience and enable access to web applications, the portal manager is currently being used for unified management of components and application users.

The Ministry also has a set of applications available to the entities that support electronic processing and are integrated with the online platform, as well as a set of web services enabling the entities’ information systems to access the e-government architecture. These include the Document Management Service, the Electronic Signature Service, the Records Manager Web Service and the Fee Payment Service.