Today's local authorities and public sector players face a major challenge: transforming a growing mass of data into reliable digital services that are useful for management purposes. Information systems are struggling to keep up.
The data is heterogeneous, often scattered, and sometimes difficult to share. Geographical data, business data, IoT, documents, photos, regulatory histories… the diversity is immense.
Teams must contend with limited governance, poor interoperability and outdated architectures that hinder evolution. Critical issues are also added: cybersecurity, sovereignty, cost control and the demand for transparency.
In this context, the modern data platform becomes an essential foundation. It allows for the pooling, reliability, and efficient exploitation of this informational heritage. It becomes a strategic lever for aligning digital innovation and public service missions.
The Géo Vendée project illustrates this modernisation of the information system: a transformed IS, reinforced digital services, industrialised data usage, and concrete preparation for AI.
A data platform is no longer simply about storing information. It organises data so that it is accessible, reliable, and usable by a large number of stakeholders. This is particularly true in the context of territorial data, where geographic data, 2D/3D data, sensor measurements, business data, or administrative references coexist.
The approach Data Lakehouse allows to preserve the richness of this data as much as to unify it in a coherent architecture.
For a grouping like Géo Vendée, this ability to integrate extremely varied data represents a profound change. The platform becomes a common space where local authorities can pool their information, enrich it, and exploit it within a governed framework. It strengthens the sovereignty of local actors, secures sharing, and facilitates interoperability.
The collection or update processes are automated, and traceability becomes a central element: who produced the data, how it evolves, who can access it?
This modernisation also paves the way for new uses. Digital twins, for example, require an architecture capable of combining GIS data, IoT data and business models in near real-time. AI agents, meanwhile, rely on contextualised and governed data.
Finally, an initial business case such as waste management can be used to quickly validate the value produced: consolidation of tonnages, understanding of the use of waste collection centres, increased visibility of incoming flows. This is not a technical exercise: it's a practical tool for more effective public management.
Do you want to understand if your organisation is ready to modernise its IT system?
The modernisation of the data information system begins with a structured approach.
The first pillar consists of building a solid technical foundation. In the case of Géo Vendée, this meant putting in place an open, managed cloud platform capable of absorbing complex data such as geographic data. This solid foundation was laid using an accelerated approach, Platform Builder, which enabled the rapid deployment of a ready-to-use cloud architecture, while incorporating DevOps practices to streamline the integration, testing and deployment pipelines. This platform is not a “major project” but a progressive foundation, designed to evolve in line with usage. This progressive foundational approach has relied on components and best practices, leveraging the public cloud and DevOps orchestration, to accelerate the go-live of the first pipelines while ensuring scalability and governance.
A second step, often underestimated, concerns the activation of a first use case. The “Waste Management” MVP served as an anchor point. It allowed for the involvement of business units, testing of ingestion pipelines, demonstration of value, and the initiation of collective momentum. In parallel, the Géo Vendée teams were trained to gradually become autonomous in essential practices: ingestion, modelling, operation, and governance.
The scaling then takes place in a controlled manner. The integration of a large number of new sources, the creation of views or the opening up to new members are only possible if the governance is structured. This is where key roles (Data Owners, business referents), access policy, FinOps supervision and user awareness come into play.
This method then allows for scaling. Géo Vendée is thus preparing for a massive expansion of data integration and the development of business AI agents. Projects that require a modernised, coherent IT system capable of supporting the territory's future digital services.
We are observing a strong convergence: data platforms are becoming genuine territorial digital infrastructure. They play the same role as a transport network or an energy system: they organise, structure, and distribute an essential resource. For a territory, this resource is data.
Our conviction is that public sector organisations need to Information systems capable of growing with their uses. Digital services are evolving rapidly: simulation, urban planning, environment, energy, mobility… Decisions are becoming more data-driven. Citizens expect more transparency. Regulatory constraints are intensifying. AI agents and digital twins are becoming realistic prospects, provided the foundations are solid.
Projects like the one carried out with Géo Vendée show that a progressive, structured, and business-oriented approach creates lasting momentum. A modern data platform isn't just for centralising data. It enables territories to innovate, make better decisions, and, above all, gain autonomy.
For public organisations, modernising their information system is no longer a technical issue: it’s a matter of performance, transparency and sovereignty. A modern data platform offers a robust framework for reliable data, shared usage and the deployment of digital services that are faster, more secure and better suited to the needs of local stakeholders.
The Géo Vendée project shows what a progressive approach can bring: a solid foundation, an initial concrete business case, and then scaling up to advanced uses such as AI agents or a digital twin.
At JEMS, we support organisations in designing modern data platforms, conceived to sustainably address their governance, innovation, and performance challenges.
Would you like to explore how a Data Platform could transform your services, optimise your business workflows or prepare your future AI use cases?
Modernising an IT system often remains a long and complex process: choosing an architecture, integrating cloud services, implementing governance, securing data flows... It is to simplify this step that JEMS has designed Platform Builder, a standardised data foundation that accelerates the implementation of a modern, reliable and scalable platform.
The approach is based on a tried-and-tested cloud architecture, pre-configured modules (ingestion, transformation, governance, monitoring), and an integrated FinOps methodology.
The objective: reduce implementation time, secure the foundations, and enable teams to quickly focus on business use cases.
In a project like Géo Vendée, this type of accelerated foundation allows for a quick start, reliable initial use, and calmly prepares for future work.
