A pleasant surprise – that’s the current German government’s push to digitize and de-bureaucratize German administrations for all proponents of digital transformation. In fact, the plans are not just a push; they are top of the priority list.
Distance learning, contact tracking and digital vaccination passports are just a few of the keywords that have highlighted the clear need for development in public institutions over the past two years. Particularly in comparison with Austria and Switzerland, it is not the first time that it has become clear that Germany is in last place when it comes to digitizing its public administrations. Commenting on the topic under the heading of “crisis resilience,” bitkom calls for digital technologies to be used to speed up administrative procedures. The majority of society should also have access to online public services.
The vision: interdisciplinary and agile project teams
“Modern state and democracy” is the headline with which the new federal government is putting the modernization of public administration at the top of its agenda. Interdisciplinary and agile project teams are to overcome silos and establish modern structures across departments and agencies, while rewarding the institutions’ own initiative and courage in pursuing their goals. This was also emphasized by Martin Kaloudis, CEO of BWI GmbH. In his keynote at the #SCCON21 (Smart Country Convention) organized by bitkom, he focused on the revolution in working methods away from a top-down principle and toward agile methods. bitkom itself calls for an administration that is equipped for the future and is as agile and modern as its society.
The model is very familiar to our business partners: For example, we have been successfully implementing agile working in collaboration with our customer, the University of Vienna, since 2014. In a joint project, we developed the u:space portal for students and teachers, which supports everyday academic life from online admission to the start of studies. The u:space portal now records over 18,000 page views daily. With the introduction of agile work processes and ongoing further developments as well as the integration of existing legacy systems, high quality, low costs and security could be ensured.
“Above all, the conversion to agile working methods, but also the competent introduction of a microservice architecture, helped us enormously. This resulted in over 30 sub-projects in more than 85 applications and a longstanding, successful cooperation.” says Stephan Prechtl, Head of Coordination Study Services and Project Manager SSP Project about the cooperation with Cloudflight.
The German administration cloud strategy
From a technical perspective, the current German government’s plans, as initiated by the previous government, are to be implemented using cloud and multicloud strategies.
What does this mean? Numerous measures are planned to strengthen the digital sovereignty of German institutions. One of these is the administrative cloud strategy already adopted in the federal approach, which serves as a basis for creating standards and open interfaces. The intention is to make existing federal cloud solutions modular, and to enable cross-cloud use of applications. Cloud ecosystems as the basis for digitalization, so to speak.
Future viability is an important keyword here, because this is to be enabled by planned open source applications. In addition, the aim is to achieve independence from technology providers.
The IT infrastructure should be scalable and easily reusable. The planned standardization of the federated cloud solutions is to enable networking of the solutions and include the central areas of the cloud architecture layers “from development to commissioning to the operation of applications”. Open and resilient systems, fair competition, and a level playing field are also basic prerequisites for innovation and economic performance, bitkom adds.
However, things are already happening at the international level as well. Under the name Gaia-X, a project is already underway involving stakeholders from business and politics with the aim of advancing cloud and data infrastructures at the European level. For this reason, bitkom is calling for the framework conditions for digital infrastructures, which are disadvantageous in the international environment, to be improved. The claim is an ecosystem for both the private sector and the public sector in which hybrid IT architectures can be mastered in a modular and sovereign manner. This is particularly important for the creation of scaling digital business models, especially in the industrial B2B context in Germany and Europe.
For Germany, the government has very specifically defined five areas that are to serve standardization and uniformity. The agreement makes it clear that these five areas should create clarity in the establishment of new structures: Unified platforms, processes, and architecture specifications for application development. But not only that – there will also be standards in application deployment, standardized management environments for application code versioning, a standardized infrastructure service as well as technological stack, and finally, harmonized operational standards and models.
Cloudflight as a proven partner in the digitalization of administrative structures
We rely on open-source technologies and bring many years of experience in this area. “The great advantage of the solutions we develop is that they can be fully integrated into existing systems and software landscapes,” says Jörn Petereit, COO of Cloudflight and member of the main board of registered society bitkom.
Since 2014, our agile project teams have been working with the Federal Audit Office to future-proof the Austrian Ministry of Justice through the ergonomic interaction of all legal applications. Today, the authority already has a uniform user interface in which all systems converge and on the basis of which numerous analog process steps could be digitized.
The employees of the Austrian health insurance company also benefit from the collaboration with Cloudflight. Picklist is the software-as-a-service solution developed by us for automated document processing – a system that can be fully integrated into existing software landscapes and handles all pre-processing of documents. The insurance company’s employees thus have important capacities free to devote themselves to more business-relevant activities. In the German administration, Picklist could also be easily integrated into existing systems and used to digitize document processing, thus enabling time savings of 90 percent per use case.
In short, the know-how Cloudflight’s agile project teams have demonstrated in Austria together with various public sector players, the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) or the Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ), can easily be brought over to German authorities.
If you would like to learn more about the individual projects, contact us now: Based on the adopted coalition agreement, we want to help lead German administrations into the future.