Review of the Digitization Act: what Tomasz Mazur says about the new requirements
The new Digitization Act is coming into force faster than most IT companies assumed in their budgets. Tomasz Mazur, in conversation with our team, explains why technical readiness is only half of the success in the clash with the Polish administration. The result is visible in the documents, not in the presentations, which is why we take the new regulations apart piece by piece.
Official API is often just a promise
We met Tomasz Mazur in his office in Warsaw's Wola district. He got straight to the point. According to his latest audits conducted in 84 public institutions, only 19 of them have infrastructure capable of handling the traffic that the new Digitization Act will generate. The rest rely on temporary solutions that often crash with a higher number of queries. This is key information for developers: your code must be resilient to server-side errors on the government side, which happen on average every 3.2 hours on business days.
We see it every day at Srivakula Gov Affairs. IT companies come to us with a finished product that works great in a test environment but 'crashes' when trying to connect to the real database of an office. We check facts, not assumptions – the problem is usually not the company's code, but outdated certificates on the administration's side. Without proper paper preparation and knowledge of procedures, developers lose about 42 hours a month fighting windmills instead of building new features.
Tomasz Mazur emphasizes that the new act from March 2025 introduces rigorous requirements regarding system response time. If your system does not respond within 450 milliseconds, it will be cut off from the data bus. This is a change that will exclude at least 14% of smaller players from the market who have not invested in optimizing their servers. We at Srivakula Gov Affairs make sure that our clients are not in this group by providing precise technical guidelines.
An official doesn't look at the cleanliness of your code, only at whether the PESEL number in the third column of the table matches.
Security is not just a certificate on the wall
Paweł Kwiatkowski, our cybersecurity expert, asked Tomasz about the new ISO standards that the act introduces through the back door. It turns out that from March 14, every IT company handling citizens' data will have to undergo an external audit within 94 days of signing the contract. This is not another piece of paper to hide in a drawer. This is a real verification of how you store encryption keys and who has access to the server room after 5:00 PM. We have already seen fines of 45,000 PLN for the lack of a simple entry register.
We speak plainly about difficult regulations: if you do not have an implemented incident reporting procedure in less than 47 minutes, the new Digitization Act will crush you. Tomasz Mazur noticed that most IT companies declare security, but in practice, their logging systems are as full of holes as Swiss cheese. At Srivakula Gov Affairs, we help patch these holes in the documentation before an auditor from the state does it. Our experience shows that a solid legal background saves about 3.2 hours a week on explaining oneself to the office of digital communication.
It is worth adding that the act provides for special bonuses for companies that demonstrate 99.1% availability of their services on an annual scale. These are not only points in a tender, but real deductions from administrative fees, which can amount to up to 12,340 PLN per year for a medium-sized software house. Tomasz Mazur notes, however, that monitoring this availability must be done through certified state tools, and not your internal dashboards. We check facts, not assumptions – this is where the real uphill climb for IT begins.
How to talk to an office so as not to be dismissed
The third part of our conversation with Tomasz focused on communication. The result is visible in the documents, not in the presentations – this sentence was mentioned several times. Officials in Poland are flooded with letters they don't understand. If your company sends technical jargon to a person who has been working in the same position for 23 years, don't be surprised that you get a reply 'please complete formal deficiencies'. Tomasz Mazur advises: write as if you were explaining the system to your aunt. This is the only path to success in Polish B2G.
At Srivakula Gov Affairs, we play the role of an interpreter. We translate 'microservices architecture' into 'modular system with division of responsibility'. Sounds similar? For the office, it's the difference between acceptance and rejection of an application. Since September 2016, when we founded the office in Warsaw at al. Jerozolimskie, we have handled 487 cases in which the main problem was precisely the lack of understanding of the language. Our team, currently counting 14 people, spends an average of 11 hours a week on stylistic corrections alone in the technical letters of our clients.
The truth is that offices have their favorite phrases and formats. The new Digitization Act imposes standards but also leaves loopholes. Tomasz Mazur indicates that 37% of refusal decisions in 2024 resulted from wrong addressing of the application or the use of an outdated form. This is a waste of time you can avoid. Your IT, our paperwork – we keep our finger on the pulse and know when the color of the stamp in the ministry changes. Thanks to this, our clients get answers an average of 11 days faster than the competition.
The biggest barrier in Poland's digitization is not the lack of fiber optics, but the official's fear of pressing 'approve'.
The costs of an error and specific numbers for 2025
Finally, Tomasz Mazur presented us with a brutal economic bill. Implementing the new requirements of the Digitization Act is a cost of around 23,450 PLN in the optimistic variant. However, if you start acting after January 1, 2025, this price will increase by at least 40% due to the lack of available experts on the market. At Srivakula Gov Affairs, we suggest booking slots for audits now. Our schedule for the first quarter of next year is already 87.3% full.
Don't be fooled by promises of 'seamless integration'. Every API is a different story. In 2024, we recovered a total of 4.7 million PLN for our clients from unduly charged contractual penalties in IT tenders. Most of these penalties resulted from failure to meet digitization deadlines, which were unrealistic from the very beginning. We check facts, not assumptions: if the project schedule does not take into account 14 days for acceptance of cryptographic keys by the office, then it is a schedule to be corrected.
Honestly, we are not the cheapest company on the market. But when you consider that one day of your system downtime in the public sector costs an average of 4,120 PLN, our rates become very reasonable. Tomasz Mazur summarized it briefly: in Polish IT, those who understand that documentation is as important as code will survive. We at Srivakula Gov Affairs take care of the latter so that you can focus on the former. Get an audit quote in 24h and don't be surprised by the new regulations.
