The digitalization of public administration services in Germany could be coordinated in a significantly more efficient manner with a platform approach. This is one of the core messages of a brief study conducted by fortiss on behalf of FITKO, the implementation arm of the federal-state IT planning council. The study was published on March 4, 2021.
As the underlying operational organization of the IT planning council, FITKO is tasked with coordinating implementation of the digitalization of the public administrative services and managing the dependencies associated with the federal structures. In this context, comprehensive digitalization of the public administration services in Germany is an immensely complex undertaking. The study therefore examined which coordination challenges stem from a federal standpoint and highlighted a platform approach as a way to effectively address this issue.
Co-creative services and solutions
One of the greatest coordination challenges involves linking the federal, state and communal IT systems, a key prerequisite for user-friendly implementation of the OZG. For the study, fortiss researcher Peter Kuhn, a member of the Open Data and Information Management field of competence, examined the key question of how a digital platform ecosystem could help to significantly reduce the high degree of coordination effort in a digital public administration services system.
The goal of the platform is to directly involve all participants in the development of the platform – local, state and federal governments, IT service providers, and especially users – so that services and solutions are created jointly. As provider of the platform, FITKO supplies the relevant information, tools and opportunities for sharing information. The study details concrete recommendations for how a digital platform can be implemented, particularly for the FIT-Connect platform approach currently being developed by FITKO.
