Case Study: Gobierno Autónomo Municipal de La Paz achieves digital transformation and fully online, time- and cost-saving citizen services with Microsoft Azure

Open Source platform on Microsoft Azure enables a municipal government’s digital transformation

The Municipal Government of La Paz, Bolivia — a city of about 800,000 with 6,000 municipal employees across 40 locations — needed to replace an aging, paper‑intensive platform and comply with a legal mandate to move toward open source. The challenge was to modernize and unify citizen services, improve interoperability across varied systems, and reduce operational and IT costs while preserving data privacy and scalability.

La Paz developed iGob24/7: a four‑component platform (citizen registry, online portal, civil‑servant tools, and workflow/document/territorial management) built on open source (Debian GNU/Linux, MongoDB, PostgreSQL) in a hybrid architecture using Microsoft Azure IaaS. The solution enabled 90% of municipal procedures online, digital payments and appointments, centralized up to ~400,000 citizen records, saved more than $500,000 in the first year on IT resources, and cut processes that once took days to under five minutes while maintaining interoperability and scalability.

Gobierno Autónomo Municipal de La Paz

Roberto Zambrana

Director of e-Government and Management Modernization