Product Vision

Digital government services in Switzerland are built around administrative processes rather than the people who use them. The result: citizens and businesses face barriers that prevent them from accessing services they are entitled to.

The consequences reach beyond the citizen. Poor user experience creates a cascade of administrative problems: low submission quality drives repeated correction loops, high support volumes, and process delays. The administration pays the operational cost of tools never designed with the user in mind.

Digital government services fail because they are designed from the inside out, built around administrative logic rather than user needs. Our answer is to design from the user outward.

Every Smart Dossier implementation is built to achieve four outcomes:

When submission quality is high, the administrative cascade disappears: back-and-forth corrections, support volume, delays. The administration’s efficiency problem is solved by solving the user’s experience problem first.

We deliver this through AI-driven rapid prototyping: a screen-complete, fully interactive prototype in days rather than months. Real users — applicants, reviewers, programme managers — interact with real screens before the production build begins. Their feedback directly shapes criteria, workflows, and decision logic at the stage where changes are cheap. Business rules, edge cases, and workflow decisions are resolved before they become expensive. The production build starts from a validated, mature specification — and users arrive at go-live already familiar with the system. That familiarity is what drives acceptance.

Smart Dossier is a configurable platform for structured dossier-based workflows. It provides the core infrastructure that every dossier program needs:

Innovation rarely starts at the top. When processes are centralised at the national level they become fully standardised, yet also rigid, with decisions locked in for decades and little room to adapt.

Change starts at the edges: a canton experimenting with a new climate subsidy, an association launching a quality label, a foundation opening a grant round. These programs start small and grow. As participation increases, the process needs to formalise: criteria defined, submissions structured, review made consistent, outcomes tracked. At some point a spreadsheet is no longer enough. A decade-long national IT procurement is not the right answer either.

This is Smart Dossier’s sweet spot: programs that are past the spreadsheet stage but not yet rigid enough for a centralised national system. Programs where the criteria still evolve, the volume is growing, and stakeholders need to see and shape what they are building before they commit to it.

Labels and awards belong to the same pattern. A sustainability label, a quality certification, or an innovation award is at its core a structured assessment: applicants submit evidence against defined criteria, a panel reviews and scores, a decision is issued. Criteria evolve each cycle as the program matures.

Each implementation configures its own criteria catalog, scoring model, workflow states, and calculation formulas while sharing the platform’s core infrastructure.

Smart Dossier is planned to be released as Open Source software — aligned with the Public Money, Public Code initiative and Switzerland’s EMBAG legislation. Publicly funded digital infrastructure should be a shared commons, not a proprietary asset.

This means any public body can inspect, audit, and adapt the code; implementations can share and collaboratively improve features; and no single vendor controls the platform. MD Systems operates an Open Source Program Office to steward the client community: coordinating shared development, managing the release roadmap, and supporting new implementations.