18 May 2022

La Salle Campus Barcelona and Localret create the 'Digital Municipality Metamodel' as a paradigm for digital transformation of municipalities

The project has been carried out with the participation of experts from the Catalan municipalities of Tarragona, Lleida, Sant Feliu de Llobregat and Esplugues de Llobregat

The process of generalized digitization of society has also reached municipalities, which, above all, as a result of the pandemic, have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation to provide better service to citizens. La Salle Campus Barcelona-URL and the Consorci Localret, after several months of research and work, have created the 'Digital Municipality Metamodel', a detailed and complete guide that offers municipalities a customizable standard model for digitization based on its challenges, its resources, its economic activity, its social reality and the state of development of the digital administration, among other variables.

The 'Digital Municipality Metamodel' has been developed through a multidisciplinary and collaborative process, in which the academy (La Salle-URL) and the local administration have participated, promoted by Localret and with the involvement of representatives of the municipalities of Tarragona, Lleida, Sant Feliu de Llobregat and Esplugues de Llobregat. “A digital municipality for us is the town or city in which its inhabitants can fully develop personally and professionally. It is a space in which technology is a tool to make the administration more efficient, make life easier for people and establish the conditions for the new economy”, explains Andreu Francisco, General Director of Localret.

Along the same lines, Josep Miquel Piqué, director of Internationalization and Innovation at La Salle-URL and president of La Salle Technova, the innovation park at La Salle Campus Barcelona, ​​assures that "the digital transformation of municipalities is conceived as a way to respond to the goals pursued by administrations”. Piqué points out some of the project's achievements from the citizens' point of view: "It will make it possible to innovate and guarantee a good service for the population and, above all, through intelligent management, provide solutions to the new scenarios that will show up, giving opportunities for personal and professional development to all citizens to reduce inequality”.

The 'Digital Municipality Metamodel' has been based on theoretical models of global reference and is real and functional because it has been complemented with the experience of representatives of the municipal and digital sphere of Catalonia. In this sense, it could be extrapolated to other regions with comparable patterns and, far from remaining a theoretical conception, it facilitates its practical application through examples. The Consorci Localret, which brings together more than 850 city councils in Catalonia and whose mission is to accompany city councils in the digital transformation of their municipalities, in January 2021 awarded La Salle Campus Barcelona–URL the support service for defining the metamodel .

Parallel to the development of the 'Metamodel', La Salle-URL and Localret recently launched the second edition of the Executive Program in Digital Transformation - Special Municipal Edition, which trains municipal representatives on issues related to digitization. Representatives from the Catalan municipalities of Castelló d'Empúries, Manresa, Berga and Sant Esteve Sesrovires participate in this second edition.