Argentine government expands digital services to millions of citizens with Red Hat

Secretaría de Innovación Tecnológica del Sector Público

With the help of Red Hat’s open source solutions, the Secretaría de Innovación Tecnológica del Sector Público provides Argentina’s citizens with access to public information and services in a way that’s easy to use and transparent.

The mission of the Secretaría is reflected in its name: to grant access to information and communication technology (ICT) services and promote public policies that enable agencies to reach their goals of simplifying management, promoting inclusion, and expanding and improving access to services.

2022 Red Hat Innovation Awards honorable mention

A modern and flexible IT infrastructure is crucial for government agencies to respond quickly to current and future needs. Crossing the digital divide between the Argentinian government and its citizens requires addressing technological challenges in a holistic way. The Secretaría recognized that it needed an agile, modern, and innovative platform that could scale and help the organization adapt to the changing needs of its citizens. This move also required increased speed to manage and expand the delivery of services throughout the country.

In 2019, the Argentine government launched the Federal Digitalization Plan. This plan established a digital transformation strategy to use open source solutions for all government agencies, state-run universities, and municipal and provincial administrations. The Secretaría understood that full-on adoption of an agile, modern, and innovative infrastructure would be a challenge. But the ability to scale and grow, creating interoperability between disparate agencies, would ultimately benefit millions of Argentina’s citizens—many of whom are in isolated areas where services are hard to access.

This ambitious plan required collaboration on an unprecedented scale between agencies, provinces, municipalities, and included Argentina’s citizens, who were invited to provide feedback and submit ideas.

The Argentine government focused on fully transforming its infrastructure with open source tools, processes, and creating an open culture that will enable collaboration across agencies. They had already invested in Red Hat Openshift® and intended to build upon it with free community-based open source software. Their goal was to use containers to house their electronic document management system in the cloud. However, this solution proved to be more complex than they anticipated. Defining and setting up virtual machines was time-consuming, had unreasonable load times, and could not scale to accommodate the agency’s needs.

The Secretaría concluded that it was necessary to adopt a single provider to support their vision of a universal system that could handle the management and access of information and services to millions of people. They worked with Red Hat to evaluate options that strengthen their current use of Openshift as a foundation. On top of that, the Secretaría relied on Red Hat Consulting and its decades of open source expertise to help them navigate the intricacies of full digital transformation. The agency also invested in the future of their organization—and their IT teams—by taking advantage of Red Hat’s training and certification to add valuable skills that will aid them for years to come.

Together, Red Hat and the Secretaría devised a strategy that built upon the solid foundation already in place. The agency took advantage of the Red Hat Consulting team’s decades of digital transformation experience to review its current configuration and decided to upgrade to OpenShift Version 4. They also upgraded Red Hat virtualization, which enabled the IT team to define and install KPIs, automate monitoring, metrics, and debugging objects in OpenShift.

Red Hat Training’s comprehensive offerings also became invaluable to support and expand its IT teams’ knowledge and skills as they adopted these innovative solutions. 

The result was the creation of a modular system that enabled Argentina’s decentralized agencies and local governments to manage their internal and public-facing systems with consistency and transparency from end to end.

Software and Services

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux®
• Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation
• Red Hat Openshift Container Platform
• Red Hat Satellite
• Red Hat Virtualization
• Red Hat training and certification
• Red Hat Consulting

By employing Red Hat’s expansive open source solutions, the Federal Digitalization Plan accomplished its goal to bridge the digital gaps between Argentina’s separate government agencies. IT teams across all of Argentina’s government agencies were trained in the use of Red Hat solutions to improve collaboration, streamline processes, and unify application development. The time needed to build processes for different agencies was reduced from weeks to days—and in some cases, to just a few hours.

Over 100 different agencies now have the virtual support they need that allows them to operate with more transparency with its citizens, with the option of scaling to support up to 2,000. Providing information and services to Argentina’s citizens is faster, easier, and more transparent than ever before.

Using a strategy centered on Red Hat Openshift, combined with supporting solutions, including Red Hat products, consulting, and training, helped the Secretaría realize its challenging objective. The impact of the success of this project is felt by citizens and agencies throughout Argentina. The Secretaría’s investment in creating a robust infrastructure, with trained IT teams to streamline processes and app development, allowed it to focus revenue on providing important services to its citizens.