Demand
As digital expectations evolve across government and public services, agencies must find ways to modernize platforms while ensuring reliability, inclusivity and operational continuity.
Digitaal Vlaanderen - a key organization supporting digital services in Flanders - confronted a complex challenge: its legacy systems and processes were increasingly difficult to maintain and adapt, slowing time-to-value and limiting innovation.
The ambition was ambitious yet clear: accelerate digital transformation across services, improve developer autonomy and enable more efficient, scalable platforms to support evolving needs of citizens and internal stakeholders.
Digitization was no longer just a technical refresh - it was central to strategic efficiency, faster service delivery, and future readiness.
Design
we+ was engaged to design a transformation approach that balanced strategic intent with real operational constraints.
Instead of focusing on specific tools alone, the strategy was built around how people want to work and how systems should support that work sustainably.
Key principles included:
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Developer experience first - empowering teams to build, test and deploy with autonomy
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Incremental modernization - avoiding “big bang” replacement in favor of measurable progress
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Integration over fragmentation - unify data and services while embracing interoperability
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Future readiness - supporting reuse, modularity and continuous improvement
This design philosophy ensured that change was not just delivered, but also adopted by people and processes.
Deliver
The execution of the transformation path was structured and collaborative, integrating we+ specialists with Digitaal Vlaanderen’s teams.
Collaborative planning and workshops
The effort began with joint alignment on priorities, constraints and outcomes - making sure both strategic goals and operational realities were understood early.
Incremental platform modernization
Rather than replacing whole systems at once, we+ helped define and implement a phased approach. This enabled early wins and continuous learning, making each step a building block toward a resilient future architecture.
Developer-centric tooling and workflows
we+ worked with internal engineering teams to introduce modern practices:
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automated pipelines for build, test and deployment
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reusable components and microservices where appropriate
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continuous integration and monitoring
These changes reduced friction in daily delivery and accelerated time-to-market for prioritized features.
Governance and alignment
we+ supported the establishment of clear governance patterns to ensure development standards, design consistency, and cross-team collaboration.
Drive
The digital transformation initiative delivered measurable impact across teams and services.
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Improved delivery speed - teams now work with fewer blockers and faster feedback loops
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Stronger team autonomy - engineering teams can build, test and deploy with greater confidence
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Greater visibility over platform evolution - incremental progress is tracked, measured and aligned with strategic goals
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Reduced risk of bottlenecks - modular architecture and better tooling limit dependencies and delays
Overall, the engagement elevated Digitaal Vlaanderen’s ability to innovate, maintain digital services at scale, and respond to emerging user and business needs with agility and confidence.
