Unlocking Development Efficiency to Drive Innovation in the Public Sector

The Automobile Club of Italy (ACI) provides a wide range of mobility services for Italian citizens, including the administration of the country’s public vehicle registry and automotive tax management on behalf of regional governments.

Behind these services is ACI Informatica, the Club’s technology partner. They manage large volumes of data and deliver complex digital solutions to support almost every service the ACI provides to its 1.3 million members and 39 million Italian car drivers.

ACI Informatica has a long history of bringing innovation to the Italian public sector. However, in recent years, the organization faced growing pressure to deliver new digital solutions around ACI’s core business, while also managing an increasing number of custom applications for their support processes, such as HR and finance.

Significant resources were devoted to developing and maintaining these custom solutions or personalizing commercial off-the-shelf products. This was both costly and time-consuming—limiting ACI Informatica’s ability to focus on new, innovative projects.

“We needed a dedicated low-code platform that wasn’t tied to any single vendor’s ecosystem. We wanted to avoid being locked into a product’s specific technologies or solutions, but we also knew we often need customizations that can’t be met solely by out-of-the-box products features,” said Alfredo Schiappa, Head of ICT Strategy for ACI Informatica.

Standardizing Software Development

In recent years ACI Informatica has taken steps to make their IT infrastructure more future-ready. “The main technological architecture we used is a typical J2EE infrastructure. We have a lot of services and microservices, and there are several solutions for front-end interfaces,” said Marco De Angelis, ACI Informatica’s Web Application Development Lead.

“For deployment strategies, we are moving to an internal cloud technology. We use containerization and our infrastructure is based on Kubernetes, we have established CI/CD pipelines, gitOps approach, and so on,” he said.

As part of this strategy, ACI Informatica had to look at their current software development platforms and processes. Various business units were using different technologies and deployment strategies, so the goal was to find a standard low-code platform that could:

• Increase the speed and efficiency of application delivery.
• Lower the cost and resources associated with custom solutions and personalization of commercial products used by the organization (Oracle HR, SAP, ServiceNow, etc.).
• Offer greater flexibility to switch or update solutions without being dependent on proprietary toolchains.
• Provide a path to upskill their workforce as they moved away from dated and obsolete technologies.

“Having a standard platform is a key strategy for us,” said De Angelis “We must avoid fragmenting our skills across multiple technology stacks.”

ACI Informatica’s evaluation led them to Mendix and OutSystems, and they ultimately selected Mendix due to its alignment with the company’s reference architecture and wider availability of regional partners. They factored in several technical considerations, including:

• On-premise deployment
• Native support for container orchestration platforms (Openshift/Kubernetes)
• Integration with GitLab-based CI/CD pipelines
• Availability of pre-built connectors for Kafka and SAP
• Model-driven development

“Mendix is very dynamic and if you have an open-minded approach, it can do a lot for you,” said Andrea Maffei, a business application developer and project coordinator.

Making development more visual also opened the door for greater collaboration throughout the software development lifecycle. “With Mendix we have the opportunity to get people who are not used to programming to participate in building applications, without having years of experience, and this is a very important aspect,” Maffei added.

Low-Code Positioning & Promotion

With several competing business demands, ACI Informatica has established criteria for when to use Mendix in their development landscape.

“We created an internal program named ‘Moving to Mendix’ which highlighted our vision and strategy for low code development,” said Schiappa “This way we established and communicated clear criteria for adopting Mendix within the organization.”

ACI Informatica’s criteria for using Mendix is to develop:

• Custom functionalities for existing commercial products.
• Custom workflows and integrations between commercial products.
• Support applications for core ACI products and services.

ACI Informatica will leverage Mendix whenever a process requires custom functionality which goes beyond basic personalization of a commercial product, even if the product’s vendor is offering a low code proprietary framework.

It also means that custom workflows or “glue-code” integrations between different commercial products as well as management backends or auxiliary applications for core ACI services and products will be built with Mendix instead of developing custom applications the old way.

“We’re going to replace or overhaul numerous applications that are built within individual products’ low-code tools. That alone will reduce the complexity of our environment significantly,” Schiappa continued.

There are three key workgroups in ACI Informatica leveraging Mendix today:

• The team responsible for internal enterprise applications, who are focused on creating a flagship HR system in Mendix.
• The group developing external user portals, one of which is for ACI Operators. Today, they are using Mendix to act as a door to a series of legacy applications which will eventually be rebuilt with low-code.
• The mobile applications business unit who developed an application for roadside assistance.

Outside of these core teams, De Angelis also sees team members picking up Mendix for smaller digitization or automation projects. “Many of them are trying to use Mendix to replace things crafted in Excel or Access Databases for internal usage and trying to make them more usable and enterprise-grade,” said De Angelis.

Process Digitization & Improvement

ACI Informatica began developing their largest project to date, their HR Application, in March 2024. “The HR Application supports an entire re-engineering of the company,” said Maffei. “Therefore, everything that concerns personnel – including personal data, requests for permits, holidays, leaves of absence, and so on.”

The HR application will be the single source of truth for all employee information within the organization going forward. Authorized users in HR can see a full list of employees that is filterable and sortable by specific inputs.

“The interface had to be intuitive and user-friendly,” said Maffei. “We also had to ensure the security and privacy of sensitive employee data.” The HR application contains various user roles so that individual contributors and managers can only see the information that is relevant for them.

Using Mendix, the development team was able to plot out the user stories from start to finish in collaboration with the HR team. “In this way a synergy has truly been created,” said Maffei. The HR application launched in an operating environment to 560 users.

In parallel, the team developed one of their more complex applications that is now a module within the larger HR application. The app manages tens of thousands of data points to help employees register trips and get reimbursed for gas mileage.

ACI’s truck operators who transport cars or cargo can plug in their intended route and weight, register the trip, and then get reimbursed at the end.

The mobile applications business unit has also put Mendix to the test. They developed the Roadside Assistance mobile application in just 5 months between July and December 2023.

Alessandro Pupita, senior software analyst of the unit, was pleasantly surprised with the platform’s capabilities and uptake. “At the beginning it was quite a steep learning curve, but after one month and using the Mendix Academy, I could rapidly start using the platform without many problems,” he said.

The Roadside Assistance app is a prototype for ACI’s club members and offers a new way of interacting with the organization. “Users can log in and ask for assistance on the road if they have trouble with their truck. They can request a ride to a new location, or medical support if they’ve been injured,” said Daniele Vaccaro, a senior software analyst.

Agility Across the SDLC

When enlisting a low-code platform, ACI Informatica was not just looking for faster development – but also faster testing, deployment, and maintenance. Historically, their team spent ~70% of their time on application maintenance which presented a strain on their resources.

The team looks at development in 3 phases: startup, deployment, and maintenance.

ACI Informatica accelerates new projects by taking advantage of reusable components and widgets from Mendix along with creating their own.

“Reusability and maintainability are strengths of the platform, as they are now much more convenient for us,” said software engineer Tommaso Sacramone. “The presence of the Private Marketplace enables the distribution of components that we’ve developed before.” 

ACI Informatica has created a standard UI template for all of their applications to start from. Features like the Mendix Debugger make it faster and easier for the development team to find and address issues. Time previously spent configuring deployment parameters has been reduced to just one click.

“When you have a large application finding a bug or making a small evolutionary change to a product that maybe hasn’t been touched in a long time normally requires a lot of time and some reverse engineering to understand what has been done in the first place,” said De Angelis.

Empowering Low-Code Teams

With multiple business units using Mendix, ACI Informatica is upskilling team members by introducing them to Mendix. They have created an introductory video to the platform within ACI, and then points new team members to the Mendix Academy to learn the basics.

“I recently introduced a team member to the platform who had never worked with Mendix. Within a month and a half, she took the Rapid Developer Course. She is still a beginner, but she is moving productively in a short amount of time, contrary to any traditional coding language where you need at least 6 months of learning to start actually programming,” said Maffei.

The Competence Center is always available to answer questions, and when they cannot, team members can turn to the broader Mendix community for support.

“Having the Academy and certification tools available is a good starting point for those who are starting from scratch,” said Sacramone. “Having a community behind the developer portal – it encourages communication between members and makes you feel part of something within the organization.”

Speed and Consistency at Scale

Over the last two years ACI Informatica has quickly grown their low-code team and portfolio of applications. Their team has been able to deliver at least one new feature release each month – a feat that was once impossible as team members were so focused on maintaining legacy solutions.

When reflecting on the platform, the team shared their observations around speed, usability, collaboration, and completeness. Their advice for organizations getting started with Mendix are to:

• Start small and build up to more complex applications.
• Determine where Mendix fits in your overall software development strategy and what gaps you need to fill.
• Don’t be afraid to start and learn something new.

After 20 applications,  and just as many more on the horizon, the ACI Informatica team is setting the course for digital transformation in the public sector in Italy.