Anyone in Germany who wants a new identification card or to register a car or apply for family benefits needs an awful lot of patience. They’ll have to fill out various forms that request all sorts of information. They may need to go in person to several different government agencies or offices. Everything is complex; everything takes time.
In 2017, though, the German federal government committed to digitizing these time-consuming tasks, and it is now possible to complete many of them online.
Still, when it comes to digital services, Germany lags far behind many other EU member states. The country ranks 21st out of the bloc’s 27 countries on an index compiled by the national digital association Bitkom, which measures digital progress across the European Union.
Government modernization minister
Now, a figure from the private sector, Karsten Wildberger, has been given the job of speeding things up. The 56-year-old is the country’s first ever federal minister for digitalization and government modernization.
Wildberger has been on the job for six months; before that, he was the high-paid chief executive of the major consumer electronics chain MediaMarktSaturn.
The digitalization and government modernization minister speaks in the BundestagImage: Niklas Treppner/dpa/picture alliance
His first job as a minister was to establish the ministry. A building in western Berlin currently serves as a temporary headquarters. The ground floor used to house a car dealership. His staff were drawn from five other ministries and the chancellor’s office. Now everything from ensuring federal cybersecurity to organizing how Germans can apply for a driver’s license online happens under one roof. If another federal ministry launches a digital project, then Wildberger’s ministry has a say in that, too.
At a recent conference in Berlin, Wildberger complained that he often heard people talking about how things should be done and what they wanted done. He’d prefer to hear about how they were going to get it done, he said, and he’d like them to move more quickly.
Wildberger knows that it’s not going to be possible fix Germany’s allergy to digital progress overnight. “There’s no switch you can simply flip and then everything’s digital and everything’s fine,” he warned in his first speech to the German parliament, the Bundestag, in May. “Digitalization is a process that requires time, courage, expertise, patience and partners.”
A long list
At the top of Wildberger’s list of priorities is expanding the availability of faster internet throughout Germany. There’s a significant backlog, and the telecommunications companies are responsible. They only invest where it’s profitable for them, and that is primarily in densely populated areas. Despite federal financial aid and regulatory pressure, little has changed in that respect.
Wildberger wants to tackle data policy, artificial intelligence and digital business models in Germany, too. He is also concerned that the country’s obsession with data protection and privacy has been a brake on innovation.
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But perhaps the most difficult part of his job will be bringing regional authorities into the digital fold. A lot of offices literally have shelves and shelves of paper files and folders, and all of this information needs to be digitized.
That’s not even the biggest challenge. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the federal government, Germany’s 16 state administrations and about 11,000 municipalities have developed their own IT systems. Many are unable to communicate with one another. There’s no digital standard. Wildberger’s ministry estimates that there are more than 8,000 different systems and portals in use.
“We have built an unbelievable variety of systems,” Wildberger said.
Patient data accessible to doctors and pharmacists on demand is new in GermanyImage: Daniel Karmann/dpa/picture alliance
Previously, the Interior Ministry was working on this. A new system called the “Deutschland Stack” or “D-stack” will offer a standardized IT infrastructure with clearly defined interfaces and cloud services. These are to become the backbone of future government services.
Following Estonia’s lead
Wildberger is focusing on a few smaller projects with the aim of completing them by the next scheduled federal election, in 2029.
Online vehicle registration could become a reality. At the moment, the about 10 million registrations, deregistrations and reregistrations annually are handled by 400 specialized offices across Germany. These offices are already short of funding, so there is likely to be little resistance should the federal government take the service over.
Most German state services still use paper filesImage: Monika Skolimowska/dpa/picture alliance
Wildberger said he was often confronted with the question of why Germany can’t function as well as Estonia in the digital sphere. Estonia is regarded as something of a beacon of digital progress in Europe — all public services are available online.
Residents provide their data only once to government agencies, everyone has a digital ID, and ppeople are able to see who has accessed it. Government institutions share data through a standardized and decentralized system.
Germany is practically “at the other end of that spectrum,” Wildberger said.
To get there, the country doesn’t just need to digitize all of the paperwork it is storing — it also needs an official agreement among the federal government, the state governments and municipal authorities that allow them to share all their data. That in itself is likely to take a fair bit of time, Wildberger said.
This article was originally written in German.
