The dematerialization of administrative procedures has long focused the efforts of French local authorities. This aspect, largely initiated since the France Relance plan and its €88 million dedicated to local digital tools, has laid a technical foundation. The subject has shifted. Local authorities must now arbitrate between artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital sobriety, and inclusion, without a unified decision-making framework to address these issues together.
AI Governance in Local Authorities: A Project Without Shared Doctrine
The adoption of artificial intelligence in the public sector is still recent, heterogeneous, and poorly coordinated. Field feedback varies on this point: some metropolitan areas are experimenting with conversational agents for citizen reception, while the majority of medium-sized municipalities have yet to formalize a strategy on the subject.
The problem is not technical. It stems from the lack of a shared doctrine on what AI can or should do in a local public service. Who validates the use cases? Who arbitrates between internal productivity gains and the risk of degrading the relationship with users? These questions fall under governance, not IT.
The resources offered by Collectivité Numérique enable elected officials and general management to structure this reflection ahead of technological choices, at a time when many local authorities are under pressure from suppliers without having established their own framework.
Supporting a local authority on AI requires first working on decision-making capacity before discussing algorithms. Without local AI governance, projects remain isolated experiments that do not survive the departure of the provider or the lead agent.
Cybersecurity of Local Authorities: A Blind Spot in Digital Transformation Projects
Cyberattacks against local authorities have multiplied in recent years. The awareness program led by Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr directly targets local authorities, indicating that the risk is recognized at the national level. However, operational translation remains uneven.
A small municipality rarely has a security officer for information systems. It often relies on an external provider who manages both email and firewalls, without a clear separation of responsibilities. The local administrative capacity remains a recurring obstacle to sustainably securing digital infrastructures.
Accompanying digital transformation without integrating cybersecurity from the project’s design stage is akin to building a public building without an emergency exit. Citizens’ data, civil registry records, payroll systems: all transit through digital tools whose protection sometimes relies on a single shared password.
What Serious Local Cybersecurity Support Entails
- An initial audit of existing systems, including aging business software that no one dares to touch because it “still works”
- A mapping of sensitive data and their exposure points, conducted with staff, not solely by an external provider
- A tested business continuity plan at least once a year, to avoid total paralysis in case of an incident
- Skill enhancement for staff on basic actions, beyond a simple annual e-learning
Digital Sobriety and Inclusion: Two Requirements That Complicate Arbitrations
The digital transformation barometer shows that more and more local authorities measure their digital carbon footprint and incorporate sobriety into their practices. This shift in focus reflects a paradigm change: digital transformation is no longer solely an administrative efficiency lever; it becomes an environmental arbitration object.
Renewing an IT fleet to deploy a new business tool has an ecological cost. Maintaining an old system incurs security and maintenance costs. The available data do not always allow for a conclusion on the best choice, as the methodologies for calculating footprints vary from one reference framework to another.
Digital inclusion adds a layer of complexity. Dematerializing a service without an alternative for populations distanced from digital technology creates exclusion, not modernization. Some local authorities fund human support systems (digital advisors, third places), but these systems depend on fragile funding and local skills that are difficult to sustain.
Articulating Sobriety and Inclusion in the Same Project
The reuse of IT equipment illustrates this tension well. Local refurbishment channels are emerging, driven by social and solidarity economy structures. They simultaneously address a sobriety objective (extending the lifespan of equipment) and an inclusion objective (providing accessible equipment to vulnerable populations).
Conversely, a project for the complete dematerialization of services can improve the carbon footprint (less paper, fewer trips) while excluding part of the population. Support must help the local authority bring these contradictions to the table rather than ignore them in favor of a deployment schedule.
Administrative Capacity of Territories: The Real Bottleneck
The European Commission identifies local administrative capacities as a recurring obstacle to the digital transformation of territories. The observation goes beyond the French case: everywhere, the difficulty is not financing a project but managing it, maintaining it, and evolving it over time.
In practical terms, this means that a local authority can obtain a grant for a territorial data management tool, deploy it with the help of a provider, and then find itself unable to sustain it once the contract is completed. Project engineering and change management are lacking more than budgets.
- Positions for digital project managers or IT directors remain rare in intercommunalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants
- Pooling between municipalities, often presented as the solution, stumbles over differing priorities and political timelines
- The training offered by CNFPT covers the basics, but skill enhancement in AI, data governance, or cybersecurity requires ongoing support
Supporting the digital transformation of local authorities in 2024 is therefore not limited to a catalog of software solutions. The subject has become a local governance issue, where each technical decision simultaneously engages security, sobriety, inclusion, and internal skills. The local authorities that progress are those that have accepted to address these dimensions together, within an explicit decision-making framework, rather than stacking them in silos.