When it comes to Digital Transformation and AI, can Romania bridge the gap between potential and execution?
Romania has all the ingredients needed to become a regional hub for technology development, digital transformation, data infrastructure, and artificial intelligence.
It has talent, complex projects, and exposure to frontier technologies, niche solutions, and deep tech. What it lacks is cohesion. Unfortunately, no one has a clear mandate to connect the dots.
What we see at Connections is that direction is built project by project — through solutions that work, through standards that raise the level of knowledge and understanding of information technology, and through people who learn how to deliver mission-critical software.
I don’t believe Romania has a talent or technology problem. I believe it has a governance and continuity problem that breaks the link between potential and execution.
That link is also weakened by institutional fragmentation, where no one is truly accountable for ensuring real interoperability. It is further disrupted by political cycles of four years or less, which often reset digital transformation initiatives that would normally require five, six, or even seven years to complete, ultimately eroding the human capital built around them.
A sector-wide digital transformation project within public administration can easily take longer than the mandate of the political decision-makers overseeing it. This naturally creates challenges around ownership, continuity, and budgeting. That misalignment is one of the main reasons why digital transformation projects fail.
What else is preventing Romania from turning its digital potential into execution?
Another challenge lies in public procurement, where price is often rewarded more than capability, creating bottlenecks along the way. In many cases, cost remains the primary evaluation criterion, while quality inevitably comes at a higher price in a fair and competitive process. As long as procurement is driven mainly by price, the lowest-cost solutions will continue to win, often at the expense of quality.
In our view, several measures could significantly accelerate digital transformation across both public administration and society as a whole: a reform of public procurement, a government authority with real decision-making power over digitalization — whether a Deputy Prime Minister or a dedicated digital transformation leader — and the development of a coherent public digital infrastructure.
I would argue that the state is not slow because it lacks technology. It is slow because it has 40 different technologies that do not communicate with one another.