Berlin Anyone who wants to convince themselves of the sluggish progress of digitization in administration these days should visit an official contact point for refugees. In front of the Office for Migration in Hamburg, for example, long queues regularly form in the spring cold.
They are Ukrainians who already have accommodation in Germany but still have to officially register. While the Ukraine itself offers a digital identity on the smartphone, the refugees in Germany find an administration that is still dominated by fax machines. If you want an appointment, you have to draw a waiting ticket and wait in front of the door.
In order to improve this situation quickly, an alliance has come together in Berlin to tackle the major project of a digital state. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Federal Ministry of Finance, the Federal Foreign Office, the federal states of Hesse, Hamburg and Baden-Württemberg and many players from the economy will be there.
They all want to get together on the new “Govtech Campus” in the north-west of Berlin to bring the state out of the age of staples. The administration should get to know the visions of the economy, the economy should understand the needs of the administration.
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The meeting place was set up by Lars Zimmermann, founder of the Govtech company Public, Markus Richter, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the federal government, and Patrick Burghardt, CIO of the state of Hesse.
The Govtech campus will be officially opened on Tuesday. Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) hopes that this will create one of the leading tech ecosystems for state and administration in Germany and Europe. “These are new paths that we are now treading as a state,” Faeser told the Handelsblatt. Federal Minister of Finance Christian Lindner (FDP) has already visited the premises.
The Govtech Campus shares the building with the newly established Artificial Intelligence Campus (AI Campus). Accordingly, the equipment is hip instead of conservative, an automatic canteen cooks lunch according to the wishes of its customers and can remember individual preferences.
Artificial intelligence (AI) should also play a major role in the vision of modern administration. Jonas Andrulis, founder of the AI company Aleph Alpha, explains what this could look like one day. If he has his way, the administration should soon have “an infinite number of smart interns” at their disposal, as Andrulis describes his own software.
Because Andruli’s program has contextual knowledge that is comparable to that of a young person who has enjoyed twelve years of German schooling. However, without tails and memory gaps.
So technology kind of knows how the world works, for example bus stops can rust, but people don’t. That sounds banal – for a piece of software, however, it is revolutionary.
The AI start-up from Andrulis wants to use its software to provide digital assistants for administration.
(Photo: Getty Images)
“Up until now, AI has always been blind to human contextual knowledge,” explains Andrulis. In order to be used in an environment such as administration, the software must have a certain general knowledge and be familiar with how humanity works.
“The AI can then, for example, write easy-to-understand summaries of a large number of complex documents,” says the founder. Tasks that a clever intern could do with a lot of time.
The software can only be used for specialist tasks with the support of the responsible experts. Just like an intern. Unlike a flesh-and-blood temporary worker, she is not tied to the usual working hours and can be multiplied for a wide variety of purposes.
It remains to be seen how the idea will be received by the administration. But the Govtech campus is designed to ensure that technologies like Aleph Alpha’s aren’t developed around the realities of government officials.
Management often unattractive for start-ups
Federal CIO Markus Richter has high hopes for the cooperation: “What’s new is that we already take into account problems that could prevent innovations from becoming productive when the idea is developed.” Because that’s why the use of technologies often still fails at the moment.
Another problem is the procurement process in administration, which is currently still too unattractive for technology companies, as the co-founder of the Govtech Campus Zimmermann explains: “We have to rethink the entire procurement system.” There are currently many problems: start-ups are in tenders insufficiently taken into account, processes are lengthy and the administration has a bad reputation.
“Many start-ups cannot afford to hire someone to search job portals every day,” says Zimmermann. That’s why the administration doesn’t even come into contact with tech companies that might be able to offer a solution.
The Govtech Campus therefore wants to set up a kind of test laboratory in which new types of tenders and processes can be tried out. Zimmermann calls the project a “sandbox for procurement”. This is based on the approach of being able to try out a new idea, change it and, if necessary, stamp it out again. An inventive spirit that has so far been rather rare in administration.
Artificial intelligence equipped with contextual knowledge should help the administration.
(Photo: imago images/Sylvio Dittrich)
The Govtech Campus is also planning an app so that administration and the tech scene can exchange information more intensively in the future. Authorities and companies should be able to present themselves on it. If there is a “match”, i.e. if both sides are interested in each other, a cooperation can result.
Another approach for the state of the future would be an algorithm that could help the tax office, for example, to select which tax returns need to be checked more closely.
Jann Lorenz Spiess, assistant professor of IT at Stanford University and lecturer at the Govtech Campus, cites the algorithms of streaming platforms as a role model. “If I want to watch a nice movie on Netflix, a complex algorithm can pick me a movie that I like with a high probability,” he explains. After a little training, an algorithm could also provide a similar level of accuracy for electronic tax returns.
The big question remains, however, whether the Govtech Campus will actually lead to these modern approaches breaking up the encrusted public structures. Professor Thomas Meuche, administration expert at Hof University, is skeptical.
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“The approach of developing a solution for the entire administration and bringing many players together is correct,” he says. However, his experience showed that this was not feasible. Municipal self-government, hierarchical problems and backward training played a role. “They have incredible tenacity in administration,” he says.
Nevertheless, co-initiator Zimmermann is optimistic that the Govtech Campus could bring the digital breakthrough for the administration. “There is only one such model so far, and it is here,” he says. If everything goes well, the idea should become an export hit.
The Austrian Digital Minister Margarete Schramböck has already stopped by. In a next step, however, satellites of the original campus from Berlin are to be created in other German federal states. Frankfurt and Hamburg are already in the starting blocks.
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