Do you know what a Fax Machine is?
You should try to work with the German public sector and will get to know it.
Germany is the fourth largest economy in the world. At the same time, it is one of the countries with the lowest percentage of digitized public processes.
How can that be?
There are several problems in German society, which are holding back the digital transformation. Germans love the word „Datensicherheit – Datasecurity”. There are afraid of losing their data. Furthermore and maybe the biggest problem is the understanding of digitisation and a digital transformation of the public sector.
Digitalising something as large and complex as the public sector is an enormous transformation task. Doing so would lead to rethinking structures, communication, including the digitisation of public administration, the automation of public sector work flows, and policy issues and cybersecurity.
It all starts with the mindset of the people and the willingness to do something different. An understanding of, what digitalisation can do for the people, who actually work in the public sector is the first step. Digitising public service administration interactions can save citizens significant time., which leads to happiness and satisfaction. Digitalisation plays such an important role in our modern society that the topic even has a huge impact on politics.
Digitalisation has a strong impact on national economies, value pools may shift within and across industries and the economic leaders of today may be replaced. Governments need to take precautions to ensure that start-ups and established companies can create new business models and digitize their existing operations. The public sector, including the education system, can play an important role in three areas:
Human capital development
Regulatory enablement
Support of innovative networks
In most countries, public sector expenditure represents 35 to 60 percent of the GDP. This means that the state’s digital transformation is the largest transformation. Fast progress requires agile, interdisciplinary teams that can quickly turn an idea into implementation.
Citizens demand flexibility, speed and tailored solutions in their daily lives. However, Germany’s public sector has been slow to adapt their services to meet these needs. Case in point: the average visit to a public service provider in Germany takes about 2.5 hours. In addition, in larger cities, an appointment with a public office needs to be booked at least three months in advance and administrative offices often have limited opening hours.
To start the digital transaction in the public sector, the german Gourvemnt made „OZG – Onlinezugangsgestz“. It obliges the federal, state and local governments to offer their administrative services electronically via administrative portals by the end of 2022 at the latest and to link these to form a portal network.
Of course, the local governments are highly overwhelmed with the tasks and have a huge leck of expertise.
This is where a potential business lies for the private sector, to help the public sector to go through digital transformation.
