Key factors for the success of digitalisation in public administration

The pace of digitalisation in public administration in Germany is not the subject of criticism. Germany’s position in international rankings is making little progress, and the failure to meet the targets set out in OZG 1.0, as well as the rejection of OZG 2.0 by the Bundesrat on 22 March 2024, are dampening the mood. Nevertheless, the organisations and individuals involved in the day-to-day operations have not been idle in recent years. Many favourable framework conditions, strategic decisions and successful projects have been achieved. In this three-part blog series, Jürgen Breithaupt presents a total of six success factors on the basis of which Deutsche Telekom is already making decisive progress in the digitalisation of public administration in Germany through practical projects, and which have significant potential to accelerate this process.

One key insight has become particularly clear over the past few years of implementing OZG 1.0. It is that successful digitalisation of public administration is only achieved when data flows seamlessly, without any breaks in the process, from the electronic application form right through to the specialist procedure. In this context, we refer to end-to-end processes or data flows. Naturally, both directions must be taken into account: from the citizen or business to the administration, and from the administration back to the citizen or business. It is also crucial in this context that administrative staff are closely involved in these seamless, electronically supported processes. To meet all these requirements, a so-called end-to-end architecture is needed on the technical side, which integrates all relevant IT components in a process-driven manner and connects them via standardised interfaces. 

Just as when building a house, a carefully drawn up and reviewed blueprint should be created for the digitalisation of public administration. This ‘blueprint’ describes all the components which, when working together, result in seamless end-to-end electronic processes without any media breaks – in other words, it links front-end and back-end areas. It is crucial here not to think directly at the product level (hardware/software product), but to operate at a higher level of abstraction, namely the functional level. In the fast-moving IT market, this allows different hardware and software products to be used over the course of several years, ensuring that the public sector does not place itself in the hands of individual manufacturers, thereby maintaining its autonomy. Another crucial factor for autonomy is ensuring that the functional blocks are not conceived or structured as being too large or monolithic. Major manufacturers, in particular, promise to provide all necessary functions within a single large ‘software suite’. Against the backdrop of the autonomy and interchangeability of individual components, the selection of the best possible components for individual functions, and the use of open-source software, a careful assessment should always be carried out in this regard.

An end-to-end architecture should always align with the administrative body’s procedural and business requirements. A bridge must therefore be built between business and IT strategy and the IT architecture. The ‘Open Group Architecture Framework’ (TOGAF®) is particularly well-suited to this purpose. Using this approach, the requirements of the business departments can be discussed, documented and continuously refined with the IT departments through joint planning processes. The Telekom subsidiary DETECON Consulting GmbH supports the administration in establishing and further developing end-to-end architectures based on the TOGAF® standard.

With the Public Innovation Lab, Deutsche Telekom has created a tried-and-tested blueprint for an end-to-end architecture for public administration. The Public Innovation Lab is ready for immediate use and enables digital administrative processes to be tested and simulated quickly and easily. The Lab consists of a selection of best-practice technical components for implementing front-end and back-end integration.

Administration-specific specialist procedures are, and will continue to be, a central component of the end-to-end architecture. The various tasks carried out by individual administrative departments are, in some cases, so specialised and so different from those of other administrative departments that it is both necessary and sensible to rely on bespoke software for these areas, tailored to the specific legal requirements and framework conditions. In many cases, this software will not be available on the market as off-the-shelf software, but must be developed specifically as so-called bespoke software. Against this backdrop, a large number of administration-specific bespoke software systems have emerged over the last few decades. These have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages certainly include the highly precise fulfilment of specialist requirements and independence from off-the-shelf software vendors. The disadvantages, on the other hand, include costs that rise steadily over the software’s lifecycle, dependence on the development partner, and ‘decoupling’ from technical progress – leading to the software gradually becoming obsolete. One of the biggest problems in practice is that the release cycles for bespoke software are usually very long, and updates required for technical and business reasons reach users far too late. This is also associated with growing risks in the area of IT security.

Modern software architectures based on so-called container technology or a so-called microservices architecture, as well as technologies and methods that integrate the application/software development process (Dev – Development) with software operations (Ops – Operations), can provide a solution here.

Even though many of the functions required in public administration can be provided by off-the-shelf software or through the use of low-code platforms (see Success Factor 3 in the next blog), there remain many areas in which, given the specific requirements of public administration, bespoke software (in particular specialist systems) will continue to need to be developed, operated and maintained for the public sector. In this context, the public sector has faced – and continues to face – the challenge of keeping costs under control throughout the entire life cycle, avoiding dependence on development partners, and ensuring that applications keep pace with the dynamic innovation cycle of IT. To successfully achieve all these objectives, the public sector would be well advised to draw on the strategies and tools of the IT industry. By establishing so-called CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery), the IT industry has succeeded in massively increasing the release cycles of its software (several releases per day instead of two per year) and thereby creating a very close integration between development and operations (DevOps). Furthermore, CI/CD pipelines also provide independence (autonomy) with regard to the operating platforms used, as the software delivered at the end of the pipeline is packaged in so-called containers, which can run on different operating systems and hardware via ‘container engines’.

With “DevOps-as-a-Service”, the Telekom subsidiary T-Systems has established a standard offering that enables public sector organisations to use a ready-to-use CI/CD toolchain for their modern software development projects. This covers the entire DevOps cycle, from Define to Learn. This allows the software development project to focus on its “core business” – technically oriented development – as T-Systems takes care of operating the tools and the environment. The toolchain, based on the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC), enables global collaboration across administrative boundaries. It is optimised for container-based software development and allows the target environment for the resulting workloads to be selected.

The DevOps-as-a-Service toolchain is already being used in a number of software development projects within the public sector. For example, the German judiciary has opted to use it as part of the cross-state project to develop a joint specialist procedure known as ‘GeFa’.