zlacker

>>nicbou+(OP)
No, no, it's all wrong.

Here's how we digitize our administration in Germany the proper, Germanic way:

A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. A bureaucrat higher up the foodchain has a friend/cousin/former colleague who runs an IT service business side gig. Guess who will win the contract. The friend/cousin/former colleague starts building by outsourcing the project to some sweatshop. The project will exceed its initially planned costs and timeline by a factor of two or more. Once completed, the final product will consist of a clunky frontend allowing the user to fill a form. After the user has completed the form, it will be distributed via e-mail to the low-level clerks. They will print it out and process it by typing the very same information into another software running on their work computers. Print again. Then the user has to schedule an appointment at the local administrative office to get the form signed and stamped in person. Upon completion, the finalized form will be faxed to the next administrative authority in the chain.

The frontend runs on a Raspberry Pi located somewhere in the administrative building. That server will of course be turned off when all administrators have left the building (save energy!), meaning the frontend will only be available during weekdays from 8 am to 1 pm.

>>271605+i8
German here. I'll have to dissent on the buddy-business part. That's not how Germany works. It's the opposite, which turns out to be even worse:

As a bureaucrat that wants to solve a specific problem, you form a project and are required to make a public submission. Those submissions have to adhere to very formal predefined legal standards (in order to omit corruption) which make them incredibly time-consuming paperwork. For some projects you'll be even legally required to make a EU submission which is even worse. Some German smart-asses "solved" that by creating a skeleton agreement with a handful of BS consulting companies (McKinsey et al.) which therefore win projects in a round robin fashion whilst adhering to some random requirements, e.g. "cheapest wins".

So what we get after all is 20 years of all federal states and municipalities being bullish of their own solutions, hundreds of failed digitization attempts for minor features as well as major services, ~3.5B EUR poured into BS consulting shops and nothing that remotely works end-to-end.

>>nforge+hc
To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.

>>jlange+le
Well, the UK does both. It has both incredible barriers to entry that exclude anyone other than consulting firms whose central skills is dealing with them from participation, and it also has VIP lanes for routing work to your mates.

>>moomin+3k
So why are online gov services still so much better in the uk then in Germany?

>>ido+Xp
1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-house. 2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like this". Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.

>>Bucket+Zv
Honestly, this just reflects the age of the population. Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of improvement, but they hate change.

>>tormeh+9y
Ah, so that's why Germany and Japan have such an easy trading relationship.

>>ethbr1+vG
Yes, finally someone else with whom to fax.