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This is what it’s all about: E-Government aims to integrate all digitizable  information tasks in public authorities, with citizens and companies.

Consequently, it is hoped to achieve a public administration that provides citizens and companies with faster and easier access to public authorities, and that makes considerable savings by improving and automating procedures. Not only will this make visits to administrative offices easier and quicker for citizens, but considerable savings will be made in the economy, making our country more competitive at global level. At least annual savings in public health administration alone are estimated at several billion.

More service for the citizen

As far as the towns and municipalities are concerned: Quite significant organizational changes will result from this for local government. Services provided for the citizen are to be performed by case-oriented citizen’s offices instead of using the currently widespread function-oriented procedures (you must go to x departments). These have several identical customer service desks providing all the services offered by the citizen’s office (“One Face to the Customer”). At least services offered range from the issuing of IDs through dog license fees and hunting licenses to vanity plates. Provision of the necessary data for the various procedures and guidance toward the appropriate procedure in the different cases can only be enabled by means of an integrated information processing system. However, these kinds of solutions are unfortunately the exception rather than the rule in German local government. What are the requirements that IT must fulfill? Most importantly it must be integrated. This means that all data is entered once only at the point of origin. This avoids duplicate tasks and safeguards against errors. However, the data must then be made available to all institutions and clerks for use in connection with individual tasks. The savings potential associated with this alone could finance the changeover to this type of solution and pass on a considerable reduction in expenses to the municipalities.

Opportunity for municipalities

Unfortunately these kinds of solutions are not yet ready for installation. There are two basic reasons for this. On the one hand, public administration is even more infected than the private economy by a belief in the need for individual solutions. This error is based on the correct notion that of course a standard solution does not proceed exactly along the lines of administrative practice, and the incorrect conclusion that a new IT solution must adapt to the established procedure – for which there is no logical reason. On the other hand, politics, at all levels actually, lacks the insight for automation-specific legislation and regulations.

Hope for further development: In the past the above factors prevented programs from being developed, which meet all requirements because they did not offer software manufacturers adequate potential for sales. Over the last few years however, considerable improvements have been made in data storage and provision technology simultaneously with the recently emerging architecture based on services providing fresh opportunities for municipalities and IT manufacturers. A few partnerships have been agreed and financial pressures are becoming so severe that extravagant individual solutions will no longer be affordable in the future.