Since 2019 Pedro Silva Dias has been the Group Head of Compliance at Millennium bcp, a leading retail bank in Portugal, with operations in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Between 2015 and 2019 he was the CEO of AMA—Administrative Modernization Agency, the Portuguese public institution that is responsible for digital public services and digital government solutions.

Before 2015, he held several senior management roles in banking and in the health care industry in Portugal. He started his career as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.

Pedro is a computer science engineer by training, with an MSc from Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. He is also a master in business administration from INSEAD, and has completed executive education in Harvard Business School.

Pedro is a true Portuguese, at least according to my very subjective impression of a Portuguese style—which has been greatly informed by him and his team, for sure.

Pedro's style of work is very formal and informal at the same time. Very methodological, yet very relaxed at once. He is always joyous, but always also very serious. Serious about the “business” of making government better through digital means and about making lives of people better.

So, these traits are not all contradictory. The fact that they can be complementary perhaps shows that national cultures (or at least the stereotypes) do not matter in digital government; they do not determine excellence in this field. But good managers and leaders do, and Pedro is one of them.

He is clearly a man of delivery, and a man of good service delivery, especially. His challenge in Portugal was to take over the program and agency that had done great strides but gotten stuck somehow. He is another example of having a strong private sector experience under the belly can be of great benefit to make change happen in the public sector, too, and at an accelerated pace.

—SIIM

How Did You Enter the Digital Government Leadership Role in Portugal?

The story began in 2014. In Portugal, we were at the time under external aid or financial support from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union (EU). The government was pursuing a new strategy for deploying public services with a focus on optimizing the network of physical service outlets, while improving digital adoption and digital offering of services. It brought more attention to customer experience, and back then no one was really used to the expression “customer experience” in the public sector.

I was invited by the government to bring in some of the experience that I had from a Portuguese leading bank on streamlining and optimizing service delivery models, at the same time increasing the customer satisfaction with the services provided. I became responsible for a special task force working for nine months with Minister Miguel Poiares Maduro, within the Council of Ministers.

This minister was also politically responsible for the Administrative Modernization Agency (AMA), and wanted to further enhance the role of this agency in the area of public service delivery. He asked me to lead it from the beginning of 2015.

Did You Have Any Hesitations for Joining the Government?

For sure! I had about fifteen years of professional experience from the private sector. I had been a management consultant: I had worked in health care, I had worked in banking. But I had no experience with the public sector or with political affairs.

It was something that I had to think very thoroughly through. It was not a very clear decision from the beginning, and I had back-and-forth thoughts. It took me three or four months before finally accepting the invitation and deciding it would be good—for both Portugal and me.

What convinced me in the end, I think, were the conversations with the minister about his vision and objectives. That led me to an understanding on what was doable and what not, how to make the challenge of changing the public sector more achievable.

Did You Have Any Conditions for Taking the Role?

There were a couple of them to make me confident and empowered to take on the role.

First, I did not have any political experience, but I had some friends in managerial roles in the public sector, and I asked for their advice. They suggested to ask for a very strong mandate from the prime minister. The legislative piece launching our task force, a resolution from the Council of Ministers, got personally signed and promoted by the then Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho, as a sign that it should be taken seriously.

Another condition was the staffing and resources for the task force at first and then AMA. This is what took probably the most time: to come up with a common position in the beginning. I did get the opportunity to hire people as technical consultants, management consultants, recruiting them from public agencies and from private companies as well.

Another important thing was the ability to have a project management office, or PMO, set up as professional consultants who would monitor the delivery of the program and the key objectives.

You Said That the Minister's Vision Was Key—What Was the Objective He Set for You and Expected You to Deliver?

He had three concerns to solve or three objectives for me.

The first one was to help them create a doable vision and strategy. Of course, they had a political agenda already, quite clear in public speeches and keynotes. But they also really needed someone who could come up with a strategy that was doable, implementable, and that could be tracked quarter after quarter. This was what I most worked on in the first six months. We ended up with a robust plan from vision down to the follow-up metrics.

Second objective, and probably the one that we less successfully achieved I am afraid, was to promote more cooperation between the public services. Worldwide and surely in Portugal, there are a lot of silos in the public administration. There were fights, contests, enmity between leaders and managers of different agencies, entrenched in their positions that sometimes they held for twenty or more years in office. I was expected to be a fresh face, someone with no political affiliations or agendas, no legacy of any kind—someone who could build bridges. We got some of that done, but overall, less than on other objectives.

The third one was a very practical objective of improving the work and output of AMA. AMA in Portugal is quite a big agency, with two hundred fifty fixed staff members and a rolling set of hundred or hundred-fifty external consultants and service providers. Overall, you have some four hundred people working at the agency. It is also very much at the center of government, has a lot of power in terms of approving ICT expenditures and funding from EU Structural Funds. So, it is important that this agency works well, smoothly, and that its services are delivered on time without significant claims from other agencies or political parties.

What Was the Digital Government Situation Like Otherwise at That Time in Portugal?

Very many pillars and building blocks were already there, built up in years before. The citizen card as our digital identity; an interoperability platform, even if not perfect but working; open data portal and open data agenda were in place. “Only once” services and protocols were already starting to be implemented. All the key core components and building blocks of good digital services were working, though they all could be improved.

The problem was that the use of these services and platforms by the public sector agencies was very low. It is like you have the roadways, but you do not have cars going back and forth. So, the most pressing challenge was that we have the infrastructure, let us use it. Let us produce content, let us produce services. Then let us in parallel also work on the adoption side—let us incentivize citizens to use the services.

What Milestones Did You Set Yourself at the Beginning in Your Role?

To be honest, my initial thinking was that I really needed to learn, and to learn fast. As I had not worked in the public sector before; I did not have the personal connections, the network, the professional credibility of implemented projects yet.

My initial objective was in thirty days or sixty days to grasp the most important details of all the ongoing projects that were delayed and not working properly. Next, I needed to be able to contribute to a solution, to prove myself useful.

Of course, this was a very short-term objective. As I got comfortable with the projects, with the teams, with my direct reports, I rapidly shifted to what were the three higher objectives of the political managers and my minister. That is why I very rapidly started working on the strategy.

I also immediately adopted new management procedures. That was relatively easy for me because I had been the leader of an operational transformation unit at my previous job in banking. We were responsible for changing the processes and for improving work within the bank.

Another aim was to build up my network within the Portuguese public administration, to very rapidly get to know the most important stakeholders. It was necessary to get a very easygoing and effective cooperation, to be able to convince them to deliver and to deploy digital services using our platforms.

What Was Your Method for Learning Really Fast, as You Set Out to Do This as the Very First Thing?

I was privileged because we had a large set of very senior and experienced people in AMA, both in terms of technical skills as well as tenure. We had people who had worked at AMA since its inception. People who really knew all the stages and phases that the agency had gone through in its maturing process. We had even some previous cabinet members for ministers and secretaries of state: very well-connected people with a very solid knowledge of all the ecosystem that was fundamental to our job.

So, I tried learning from them all during my initial period. Talking to people a lot, picking their brain. This could have been difficult because as you talk to different people, you get different perspectives and if you are new, you do not know which version to go with. However, the predominant case was that all these people were very, very helpful in getting me up to speed.

I have always been a very detailed person, with a very hands-on approach—I go into details. I like to read the technical stuff; I am a computer science engineer by training. So, I took deep dives on the projects, on the business requirements, the technical solutions, and protocols. That helped me a lot as a I moved along.

What Was Your Method for Rapidly Building Up the Relationships?

I would say I had both a collective and an individual approach.

I am a fan of individual approaches. I had a lot of breakfasts, a lot of lunches with people. Not because of their importance or their title like CEO or CIO, but because they had something to share from my point of view. I prioritized access to information rather than seniority. I was looking much more to talking to people who had knowledge about projects, about past experiences, about why some stuff had not worked properly.

Of course, we also used a lot of events and even informal sessions to bring people from different angles and different agencies together. That is the collective part. As AMA is the central government agency that screens ICT expenditures and approves EU funded projects, we did workshops and even brainstorming sessions with the agencies that applied for funds or approval. I had a lot of opportunities to be part of several meetings with very diverse people from all sides of government, including local government structures as well.

What Did the Strategy You Came Up With Look Like? What Was Its Time Horizon?

I am not sure we ever put up a strict deadline on our vision and our objectives. More than three years is infinity in this field of ours, with the pace that new technologies are developed and the adoption of new tech. Planning for five years or more just did not make sense. That is why our plan was based on performance metrics, and none of them exceeded the next three to four years.

The strategy ended up having four pillars. The first one was more on the managerial side, on the digital service offering side. The aim was to increase the range of digital services available in new channels. We had a lot of legacy services and standard means such as web portals. But we lacked innovative approaches, especially for mobile platforms.

Second was the demand side. We were lagging behind the EU average in digital service uptake. This had a lot to do with the aging of our population, also with the digital literacy of the population. We had a lot to do there so that we could later increase the adoption of digital services.

The third pillar was interoperability, and this had a lot to do with efficiency. We needed to get data reused between the services, to make services better for people and not oblige them to use things in silos.

The fourth and final pillar was to improve the content that government provides to citizens—the way we presented information, the real customer experience.

This Is a Wide Agenda—How Did You Choose Where to Focus or What to Prioritize? How Did You Sequence the Actions?

Surely we had to prioritize or sequence. Sometimes we had to put some initiatives on hold, if resources were contested. However, a lot of these actions were perfectly doable in parallel, as they had different teams behind them.

We did not have to do it all by ourselves. For example, digital literacy and digital adoption work got a lot of support from local government structures. We only had to steer their engagement and their digital literacy programs for the local populations, as opposed to the interoperability stream, which was much more reliant on our own efforts and projects within AMA. There we not only developed the strategy but also we owned the infrastructure, and we had to build and grow the platform ourselves.

When it comes to the building blocks, we sometimes had to take several months to convince a specific agency to use the platforms. This certainly delayed rollout of some other work or services. But some of these building blocks are so important, and in my personal opinion we were not wasting time—we were investing time. The effort usually proved to be beneficial later on.

We were very effective in joining up the initiatives and actions from all parts of society. This was mainly done through comprehensive big programs such as the Simplex program, already in the government of Prime Minister António Costa, which was a mass collection of concrete projects to simplify and modernize the public services (and not only digitally). It was a lot of work to compile the program, because we gathered initiatives and ideas from all different kind of companies, labor structures, other agencies, cabinet members, even individual citizens. We did a lot of cocreation with them, too. In some years, we had two hundred or more different implementable initiatives in the Simplex plan. It showed the momentum that we had managed to instill and the umbrella we provided, because we did not deliver all or most of them ourselves at all.

Another interesting program that we leveraged was called Govtech, launched by then Secretary of State Graça Fonseca, where we challenged entrepreneurs and start-ups to come up with tech projects designed to improve public services. We joined with several sponsors and partners to fund those projects.

How Easy Was It to Retain Focus through the Delivery Years? How Much Did Your Priorities Change?

The most important deliverables stayed the same, even with the change of governments. This was probably not the case with most of our colleagues in other agencies. Surely some priorities did change within the bigger plan.

For example, in first years we worked quite a bit engaging the companies and coming up with public and private partnerships for a better service experience. When governments changed, there was more appetite for government-led work instead. Flagship projects such as Simplex and Participative Budgets rapidly became more of a priority. It meant that we had to adjust to a new political context, refocus a bit the course of action—but the overall goals and line stayed the same.

What Were the Tools in AMA's Disposal to Ensure Delivery and Get Other Agencies to Come Along?

One is pretty straightforward and that is formal power. We were within the center of government; we were directly reporting to the minister in charge of the Council of Ministers, Mrs. Maria Manuel Leitão Marques.¹ It meant we had a voice to positively influence the legislative agenda and push through government decrees for digital service adoption in agencies. It also helped that we had incredible and supportive government members, such as Minister Marques and then Secretary of State Graça Fonseca—very powerful government leaders, very knowledgeable, and very goal oriented.

The second level was the existence of the most important building blocks. Even if they were not widely used back in 2014 or 2015, they were working and that made us credible within the public administration.

The third and most important instrument has been already mentioned. AMA had the power of vetting and approving both the use of EU Structural Funds and ICT expenditures for every entity (with some very few exceptions, such as the tax authority). Everyone had to come to AMA to get funding for new ICT or digital projects, explain their motivation, their goals. We were able to attach strategic conditions to the disbursement of money and get agencies on board for things such as using the common authentication platform or feeding data to the national open data portal.

You Mentioned That You Started Changing the Management Procedures. What Was Your Management Style Like?

People have always told me, and especially within AMA, that in comparison to some of the predecessors I was a very talkative and a hands-on manager. We had a lot of people thirty to forty years old. They found the traditional leaders very distant, very formal, very hierarchical, and I am nothing of the sort.

I used to walk along the corridors, enter their rooms, jump into discussions. I am not a cabinet person. I do not sit in my office and call people to come in and explain things to me. I like to walk around and sit down with people, discuss with them. I love whiteboards, or blackboards even; I like to sketch things. This is from my background and formal training. As a computer science engineer, I studied software architecture a lot and I love to draw building blocks, protocols, layers, and so on. I love to discuss this all with the team.

People felt this was what they needed. I do believe it helped to create a cohesive team and very strong bonding within the agency.

I must be sincere that this style does have a drawback, of course. I like to know details, such as why are we going to use a certain protocol on these web servers or why is there a different certificate now for that authentication protocol. It is great for me, but sometimes it is an unnecessary burden on teams when things are already a bit delayed or when stress is mounting. I understand that it is not actually my job to be into details, and so I tried to limit it more as we went along. However, it does work great for making people close to you and have them take you as one of them.

How Did You Change the Team in AMA?

It changed quite a bit.

Some people were of the legacy type that you always have in public administration, at least in Portugal. During my tenure, a lot of them gradually left, although I never explicitly pushed anyone out. It happened as the environment changed, the daily priorities changed, the management structure evolved.

In a broad sense, there was in the end a higher mix of people with technical backgrounds and from outside the public administration, with no previous links to government. I brought in people from very different backgrounds, on purpose. I had the opportunity to hire lawyers who were experienced in innovation matters such as cocreation or partnerships with private sector. Before we had only had legal experts for public procurement or similar.

In the beginning, I also brought in people to the design side—the creative side of digital. They worked to design good interfaces, to simplify the language and communication with citizens, to improve usability.

In addition, I strengthened the team in business management and controlling functions. One of the issues in public administration, and AMA in particular, was that there was a lack of managerial control or a PMO way of doing things. I got some people from other agencies for this line, but also three or four private sector people who were specialists in managerial monitoring practices.

What Was Your Selling Pitch to Convince People to Join?

It was not easy. There were several cases when I lost the argument and did not get people to jump onboard.

The most convincing argument usually was to use my own experience; I was repeating that over and over. I was quite a young guy, back then: thirty-six, thirty-seven. I kept telling people that I myself had not had experience in the public sector, I had come from private companies. That it showed that it was possible to do things differently and to make a contribution coming from the private sector. There were plenty of opportunities for you to grow, to become CEOs or take other senior managerial roles with this experience to show for.

I also was able to convince them because I had no political affiliation. I was credible in this sense.

This all convinced specifically people in the age range, say, between twenty-six and thirty-two. That is the age when people usually have an ambition to grow, but they often are at some point stuck in their current careers. They see the change as an opportunity to do a different thing.

Another pitch was again from my own previous experience. I had come from the biggest private bank in Portugal, with more than 2.5 million customers. But then you come to the public sector and you really have the entire country to serve. If you come to AMA, you will have the freedom to propose and to innovate, to experiment or test new services for the entire country. Everybody on the street will have your product and use it.

Who Was Your Most Valuable Hire?

During my tenure I was privileged to be able to hire a lot valuable people.

But I could maybe single out an external consultant with AMA who knew us well, and whom AMA knew very well as well. He came into a new role we created. In rough translation, he became the manager for digital adoption.

He had a small team, but a very broad area of everything that had an impact on digital adoption. It might begin with digital literacy programs and trainings, involve usability of specific systems or creating incentives for citizens to adopt some services. Essentially, his work was to identify opportunities for rapidly increasing the digital adoption of all systems. But he had to prioritize in that sense. Thus, he had to understand where we would reap the most rapid rewards.

He was not an engineer, not a tech guy in terms of formal background; his training was in management. As such, he brought what the team lacked—the view of cost-benefit analysis. Where would we have smaller costs for the larger benefits? That became quite useful.

What Kind of Culture Did You Try to Build in AMA?

I tried to build it by managing by example, to set the example.

First, to make it clear that we were there to explore and to innovate. We will have quality controls at some point along the way; we will test stuff before production—so do not worry about failing! You will not crash the country. By the way, we ended up having some scares every now and then but it is part of the journey.

I did not love agencies that were just comfortable doing the same stuff over and over again. I wanted people to always find something to change in the way we were doing things, even if these were very tiny details. This comes from my professional background, as in the beginning of my career, I worked a lot with lean and Six Sigma methodologies. These give you the mentality that you are always on a journey, you never reach your destination. There is always room for improvement, for identifying waste. Already on recruiting I was trying to make sure that the new people coming onboard would have this motivation and drive in them to always do things differently.

The second aspect of the culture I tried to foster is another part of my personality and something that I understood was lacking in AMA. It was teamwork. There were a lot of silos within AMA, at first, with a lot of line managers who had formed their alliances. I had to force it in the beginning, even if a bit artificially, before it soon became more natural. I started several programs and initiatives to join people together and create cross-functional teams, making people talk to each other. Simple things like significantly increasing the number of social events and gatherings. I even hired a specialized consultant on human resources management and team building. He came up with formal diagnostics and designed a series of steps to promote more mingling and team melting. It did not always work out. Even after four years, some of my direct reports still had issues in working together—a little bittersweet aftertaste for me.

One thing we tried was putting people up for short-term project work in our political cabinet. We sent them for a few days or a week to help the state secretary to cocreate some new initiatives, for example. When you are in contact with people at that level, you have to become more cooperative. We selected such engagements and people for them strategically.

What Were Your Sound Bites or Slogans You Kept Repeating to the Team?

There were three words that we put in our slides each time, even if these were not officially our motto: “Simplify. Innovate. Cooperate.”

I also have a personal motto that everyone knew. I oftentimes showed it when I was making presentations. It is from James Cameron, the famous film director, and it goes, “Hope is not a strategy. Luck is not a factor. Fear is not an option.” You have to work, and you have to plan ahead. You cannot sit back and hope that everything turns out for the best. You need to prepare. Then you do not need luck. You also cannot be fearful to innovate, explore, test different things. As I used it so much, I guess it translated a little bit into the culture at AMA.

What Routines or Rituals Did You Use to Manage the Team?

I tried to balance some very formal approaches with very informal daily habits. You need both.

As an engineer, I know that stuff either works or not. It is binary, true or false. Therefore, I believe in formal approaches to that end.

Our every new system had to have a project charter, including a clear identification of resources needed. It needed to have a really strict and detailed time plan, structured and formal monitoring of all the activities in the plan. If there was a delay or higher-than-expected consumption of resources, we had to explain why and explain the deviation. I am a believer in this approach because of the motto from James Cameron. You need to work to guarantee that work brings results. Hope is not a strategy.

However, being excessively formal will risk making people very distant, very uncooperative, very ironical. That is why I always try to balance these formal approaches with very informal and easygoing interactions. Picked up a cup of coffee or even some cookies and went to talk to people working on the project, joining the flow.

The balance is to keep a formal frequency of meetings and follow-ups, but on daily basis be close to people and have their confidence. Even if you are the boss, your job is to help them find solutions to things.

Are There Things You Regret Not Doing in AMA or Things You Think You Failed At?

I would not call them failures, or at least complete failures. But there are results that I did not achieve as I wanted.

The first one is more an institutional matter, linked with the changing political agenda. My belief is that citizens do not distinguish or do not want to distinguish between private and public services, as long as their needs are taken care of. I never bought this distinction between the sectors. That is why, in my perspective, we should have done more to increase the number of partnerships and interoperable services between public agencies and private companies. Yet, this was not a political priority after the government changed during my tenure.

The second thing is about my ability to manage AMA for delivery. We had asymmetrical improvements. We had a couple of strong successes in some areas. Everything related to digital ID such as the use of citizen cards or the flagship project of Digital Mobile Key, for example.² At the same time, we were not successful beyond some small stuff in use of open data and reuse of data. I believe that we could have done more if I had more time. We did work a lot, given the resources we had, and the team did a great job. But as we had to prioritize sometimes; digital ID work was always much more important.

The third one is more on a personal level, and this is the one that bothers me the most. I feel I was unable to reach out enough to some of the most important stakeholders in our public administration. Although I developed some very strong friendship bonds with some core stakeholders and we still keep in touch down the road now, there were a few whom I was not able to bring onboard. It might have to do with incompatibility of priorities, characters, or conflicts of agency agendas. If I could go back and improve something, I would dedicate more time to anticipate such resistances and devise specific engagement actions.

What Are You Most Proud of Achieving?

We did several good flagship projects and meaningful changes in our society. In terms of specific solutions, I would emphasize the impact of ID platforms that are being used widely now—they exploded into use. In particular, the new ways for authentication in mobile phones. The Digital Mobile Key is a widespread success in Portugal; every private service is keen on using it. Banking and other sectors can this way get citizen data from public registries to serve people better.

As I am a people's person and a guy from the field, I found the success of Citizen Spots truly gratifying. It is a digital kiosk or a physical front office, where they teach how to use digital services and increase digital literacy. These are available nationwide, including in rural areas. The concept existed already before I joined AMA, with a great incentive from Minister Miguel Poiares Maduro, and his team of state secretaries, Joaquim Pedro Cardoso da Costa and António Leitão Amaro. We were able to take it to a completely new level, significantly enlarging the number of digital services that were available through them and, especially, the size and density of the network. There were thirty spots in Portugal when I joined, six hundred when I left. They truly made a difference in bringing digital services to people who previously were not able to use them.

Another success was on the delivery and usability of digital services from other agencies. We designed a customer experience and usability toolkit, especially for smaller public agencies. It came with a lot of snippets and reusable code that they could use. It helped many agencies to upgrade and revamp their web platforms, along with the available funding from the EU Structural Funds.

Yet another great outcome was the way we got people engaged in our diverse programs. It was important for the quality of the initiatives. Merit of their outcome goes not to us but to people who spent time to participate in these cocreation sessions all over the country—for Simplex, for Govtech, for others—digitally, too, through our social media channels or dedicated websites we created to gather ideas and suggestions.

The more rural or remote the area, the more people were starving to be listened to. So, whenever you engage with them and show that their voice counts, they show up. In cities, it is a little bit harder. You need to show them that you will really walk the talk and do things. Success breeds success. It became easier once we showed how we had taken the ideas from last year and implemented them. It shows that you are accountable and not there for just the politics.

Why Did You Decide to Move from AMA and Back to Private Sector?

It was a combination of two factors that coincided.

On the one hand, there was a cycle coming to an end. My then Secretary of State, Graça Fonseca, was promoted to minister of culture. The minister herself, Maria Manuel Leitão Marques, got elected to the European Parliament, and a new cycle was about to begin. I could have stayed, sure, there was a lot to be done still.

But about the same time, I was invited to a very interesting and senior position in the bank that I had previously worked at. I was called to become the chief compliance officer and general director at the group level. This was professionally challenging and appealing to me.

Portugal had made great progress in many ways. Our entry to Digital Nations group was a testament to that and in some ways encouraged me to move on.³ I had learned a lot and developed myself as a person and as a manager.

What Did You Learn the Most in Your Time in AMA?

It is a completely different frame of mind to constantly need to seduce, engage, energize, motivate, convince others to work with you—like you have to do in a public agency and as a leader of the national digital services agenda. You need to have partners everywhere. If you are a very senior manager or board member of a big private company, you compete with other companies, you do not necessarily rely that much on external partners although you do hire them. The importance of working within a network of people as a leader of a public agency—it really puts you out of your comfort zone. That was surely one of the things that I developed most in myself.

Another area of development was my ability to be a general manager. I had managed teams of several dozen people before AMA. In my previous bank job, I was managing a sizable team of some eighty people. But it is quite different from managing an entire organization of three or four hundred people. You are the ultimate guy setting the strategy and approving stuff there. You do not go any higher up, you need to take the shots. That makes you grow up quite rapidly.

Do You Feel You Ever Got Used to the Public Sector?

I do, at least to the extent that it allowed me to steer AMA forward and to create a productive organization that has very competent and professional people. As said, the scale and number of interactions you need to conduct to get anything done or approved is far more “particular” in the public sector than private sector.

When you are dealing with innovation and digital creation, you cannot cope with standard administrative processes that take you six months to approve projects and several dozen interactions with all relevant stakeholders. That is the reason why you have to invest your first hundred days in understanding all the processes, all the obstacles, and requirements. Then you can later use them as efficiently as possible. Otherwise, innovation will always stay on paper or stuck in bureaucracy and red tape.

What Were the Remaining and Next Challenges Ahead for AMA and Digital Government in Portugal?

I believe that I left AMA with a new and more robust team culture, with new optimized internal processes, and especially with more thorough and business-oriented management practices. AMA had gotten a team unity, cohesion, and a pride that the agency lacked before.

Moving forward I guess the agency had to prepare for a much faster innovation cycle on digital services provisioning. As I said, people just want to have fast, efficient, and easy services to satisfy their needs, no matter who is providing them. The digital readiness of the Portuguese population will make it easier for the adoption of digital services, but it will definitely make it much more demanding in terms of customer satisfaction and user experience expectations. I know the agency was well-prepared in terms of skillful and experienced people, but the financial resources are always an issue.

What Steps Did You Take to Make Sure That What You Started Would Last?

It is all about people and the culture instilled in the organization. Of course, we had a lot of formal changes and new processes being written and designed. Yet, all that can be easily replaced or changed. What matters most is what people want, how motivated they are, and what they believe in. As I left the agency, my strong conviction is that all senior managers would keep improving AMA and make it much better. The “sense of belonging” was truly high. As such, the agency was prepared to endure the new challenges and to even start a new growth stage.

What Are Your Three Key Recommendations to Fellow Digital Government Leaders on How to Be Effective in This Role?

The first one is to really have an ambitious, but doable, strategy and action plan. It is important that you understand where you want to arrive in an achievable time frame. Not to project out ten-year future scenarios, but concrete and observable three- or four-year objectives. You do need a good and objective strategy plan.

Second, it is a people business. You really do need to be surrounded by committed, knowledgeable, and innovative people. You cannot make it in this field if you are not in a team of engaged and innovative people. Invest a lot in people, in enhancing your own team, and in empowering them.

Third, a digital government leader is a central figure in an ecosystem. Therefore, you should understand and steer that ecosystem. It is very important to identify and manage all the traditional stakeholders: promoters, detractors, adopters, and so on. Leading change requires cooperation, partnerships, and even alliances with them. To be an effective leader in the building and adoption of new and transformative policies and digital solutions, it is fundamental that you understand, manage, and steer all the different players who are part of your digital government environment.