Platform engineering improves delivery at the Danish Environmental Portal

The Danish Environmental Portal

A dedicated platform team accelerates the development and quality of environmental systems

Challenge

As the DEP’s portfolio of environmental systems grew, it lacked a unified approach to infrastructure development and operations. Teams within the two functions worked differently, creating a skills gap and bottlenecks that hindered both delivery speed and quality.

Solution

In collaboration with Darize, DEP established a platform team to define a unified approach to building and operating solutions. With clearly defined roles, standardized processes, and a strong Platform Manager at the helm, the organization successfully achieved a stable transition, strengthened internal capabilities, and introduced new automated ways of working.

Impact

The platform engineering approach has enabled the DEP to develop and support nearly twice as many applications as before with fewer resources. New IT environments can now be provisioned in days rather than weeks, and end-to-end ownership has improved the quality of deliveries. At the same time, a more standardized, component-based IT architecture has reduced the total cost of ownership.

Challenge

Growing challenges between development and operations

DEP develops and operates a wide range of systems that provide access to public environmental data used for everything from nature conservation to climate adaptation. The organization continuously expands its portfolio with new services and applications to ensure that municipalities, government agencies, and other stakeholders can access environmental data easily, quickly, and with a high level of quality.

As the portfolio grew, however, the challenges became more apparent. Development and operations were moving in different directions. Developers defined the architecture in Azure and embraced modern DevOps principles, while operations remained rooted in a more manual, infrastructure-focused approach.

This created both a skills gap and a communication gap between the two functions. Operations lacked familiarity with the technologies and architectural decisions underpinning the solutions built by the development team, while both teams increasingly found themselves taking on tasks outside their core areas of expertise. The result was uncertainty, frustration, and a negative impact on both the speed and quality of deliveries.

Solution

A strategic and organizational transformation

To address these challenges, the DEP, with guidance from Darize, established a dedicated platform team that serves as an organizational layer between the infrastructure and the business applications.

This became the foundation for a platform engineering approach, with the platform team tasked with bridging the gap between operations and development and creating a unified way to build, operate, and maintain business systems in Azure. As part of this effort, the platform team was responsible for ensuring a consistent, model-based IT architecture across all of DEP’s systems.

Darize helped define both the organizational structure and the key roles. The new setup was supported by standardized processes and, importantly, by strong leadership support. At the center was a Platform Manager with both deep technical expertise and strong leadership capabilities. This role was also defined in collaboration with Darize and supported by an experienced mentor to further strengthen leadership competencies.

DEP adopted a phased approach, retaining its existing operations resources while upskilling them in the new platform engineering mindset as part of the transformation. At the same time, new team members with experience in Infrastructure as Code, cloud technologies, and modern development practices were brought on board.

This created a stable transition with a strong alignment between responsibilities and capabilities. The transformation succeeded because DEP remained committed to the new principles and ways of working, even when the changes proved challenging in practice.

Standardization and automation at scale

The platform team follows an agile operating model based on Kanban and Scrum, managing the infrastructure platform as a software product with a shared backlog, continuous versioning, and clear priorities. This has reduced variation, increased transparency, and made deliveries far more predictable.

The team’s efforts focus on three core areas: standardizing, automating, and versioning the infrastructure. Today, 90% of the infrastructure is automated through code, and 80% of the technical platform has been standardized.

customer perspective

“Our focus on platform development has enabled us to deliver new IT systems quickly and cost-effectively while maintaining stable and secure operations. In short, we can now deliver more with less, at a faster pace. As a result, the Danish Environmental Portal has strengthened its reputation as an efficient organization for IT development and operations.”

Nils Høgsted

Director, The Danish Environmental Portal

Impact

Faster delivery, lower costs, and greater ownership

The effects of the transformation have unfolded gradually and intensified over time

Greater capacity, same resources

Standardization and automation enabled nearly doubling the number of applications and services without adding operational resources.

Faster time to market

New IT environments can now be provisioned in three days instead of 30.

A more standardized IT architecture

A standardized IT architecture makes it possible to build new systems faster while reducing the total cost of ownership through lower complexity, easier troubleshooting, and more cost-effective maintenance.

Greater ownership and accountability

The platform team now owns both the architecture and the infrastructure, eliminating reactive firefighting and improving the quality of deliveries.

As a result of its platform engineering journey, the Danish Environmental Portal now has a modern development and platform organization that delivers faster, more reliably, and at greater scale, strengthening its ability to provide trusted environmental data in support of its public mission.

About the Danish Environmental Portal

The Danish Environmental Portal (DEP) is a public-sector partnership between the Danish government, municipalities, and regions. Its mission is to provide the data and IT infrastructure that enables environmental considerations to be integrated into relevant decision-making across society.

DEP delivers data to more than 200,000 direct users and to over 100 external systems, serving approximately 3 million users. Its vision is to unlock the full value of data for government agencies, citizens, and businesses across Denmark.