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Digital Autonomy

Fifteen years inside an EU agency: what makes a software partnership last

BeginnerBusinessEnglish25 minutes
Friday, September 25, 2026 · 08:35 AM

European institutions commit to their platforms for decades, while procurement runs in cycles of a few years. Whoever maintains the platform becomes part of how the institution works, and replacing them is slow and expensive. The hard question at procurement time is whether the partnership will still be healthy in year fifteen, and standard tenders barely test for it.

Details

Syslab has run OiRA, the workplace risk-assessment platform of EU-OSHA, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, since 2006. Alexander Pilz uses those fifteen years to examine what makes a software partnership survive: a commercial model that rewards staying rather than re-pitching at every contract cycle, and a partner close enough to the institution to push back when a request would damage the platform. The talk closes with concrete questions an institution can ask during procurement to tell a durable partner from one optimised for winning the next tender.

What attendees take away

  • A durability test for procurement — questions that show whether a candidate partner's commercial model rewards staying with the institution or re-pitching at every contract cycle.
  • Critical pushback as a selection criterion — why a partner who sometimes contradicts you serves your platform better than one who always says yes, and why that quality rarely survives a sales-driven relationship.
  • A nineteen-year reference case — OiRA at EU-OSHA, in use across member states since 2006, as a concrete European example to take back home.
  • Where AI fits — why an institution's decisions about AI depend on the quality of the partnership that maintains its platform.

    Business Track