I built a digital form filler for a poorly-designed that every Berliner must deal with. I explain what I did to make it clearer and easier to fill.
In German state and traditional company culture, digitization is seen as a threat, not an asset. I remember a few years agon when my gf at the time was working at a big German industrial automation company and she was struggling a lot with some horribile ineficient work process involving copy and pasting shit to and from Excel and some VB scripts. So being still locked down to a degree and bored out of my mind, I replaced all her Excel madness with some python scripts that streamlined everything. She took that at work and proudly showed it to her boss hoping for some recognition and he said "if you wanna keep your job, don't bring stuff like this at work, we don't need it, there's nothing wrong with the way we currently do things", and then it hit me that current German software innovation culture is completely FUBAR.
This is not true. The head of the Berlin Ausländerbehörde is well aware of the issue and frequently says that we need to digitalize in front of the cameras.
According to contacts on the inside, they are operating at full capacity with a personel shortage and have zero slack to stop and fix things.
They have every incentive to fix things, not just out of sheer embarrassment, but because more and more people are suing the state for failure to act (Untätigkeit). I wanted to make this lawsuit process as seamless as possible, but it would not help anyone.