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Federal and state administrations will face huge challenges in the next few years – especially when it comes to personnel. Many civil servants and public sector employees will retire or retire in the coming years. This is one of the reasons why politicians have high hopes for digitalization, data-driven processes and AI support.
AI remains a difficult subject
Can AI really play a relevant role in administration in the future Controversial at the festival – because the administrative principle of traceability of decisions stands in the way of any kind of black box applications. It is not clear whether the provisions of the AI Act will actually make this easier. Negative experiences with failed government AI applications, such as the child benefit scandal in the Netherlands, were also discussed intensively among participants at the event in Berlin.
For example, a workshop on foresight methods for critical infrastructure showed how far the administration and politics still have to go. Foresight, i.e. what is going to happen in the Federal Republic, has long been ridiculed, says Clemens Gauz of the Association for Security Technology.
That has now changed somewhat. As Henning Riecke of the Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS) reports, intensive foresight is being carried out within the federal government. There are also numerous subordinate authorities, research facilities and institutes, as well as international players and private companies such as logistics service provider DHL or reinsurer Munich RE, which use foresight methods.
Information from intelligence services also played an important role in the public sector. However, opportunities to carry out foresight processes in everyday life in ministries are very limited and it is still politically sensitive to develop forward-looking plans for what is currently politically undesirable.
Approach changes in cash situation
In addition to the changed foreign policy framework and major technical issues, the changed financial situation for creative bureaucrats also plays a major role: while in recent years the federal government was often able to generously support states and municipalities with its resources, this will not be the case in the near future.
This can be seen quite practically using the example: IT in schools. During the extraordinary corona situation, the federal government massively promoted the purchase of digital devices through the so-called digital agreement. But the implementation and use of digital options in schools varies widely – and devices that were purchased in 2021/22 are in danger of gradually falling out of the use cycle.
So-called school authorities – usually municipalities – are responsible for equipping schools. Participants in a panel explained that, depending on their priorities, region and financial situation, they equipped their schools very differently. These models range from central procurement and maintenance in a city like Lübeck, with 1,400 interactive displays and thousands of devices for students, to a single community like Wiesenburg in the Brandenburg region, where a single IT specialist looks after the equipment for Dataport, the IT service provider for the northern German states, which centrally organizes the procurement and maintenance of the equipment and scales them accordingly. And everyone is facing the challenge of a new round of procurement, whose financing is uncertain and which must also meet sustainability criteria.
Large IT service providers have a clear advantage
Jens Kämper of Dataport explains that standardization is important for both profitability and sustainability. He points out that there is central mobile device management and a pool of replacement devices. These will be used if the devices break down – and anything that can still be repaired economically will be repaired. “We still rarely exceed the five-year period of use,” Kämper adds in brief. Peter Jary of the Jena Media Center can only dream of that. The positions of MDM administrators there were until now limited to the end of the year, until the funding from the digital agreement runs out, but the city council has now also acknowledged this as a problem.
Tobias Stahl from the city of Lübeck points out that the fact that “sneaker administration” has no future is economically and ecologically obvious. “We try to make everything maintainable remotely: I save CO2, travel time and working time. We have a triple benefit for every service that can be done remotely.” The only employee who is currently traveling around the city in practical mode is currently driving an electric car 2,000 kilometers every month.
A lot of electronic waste will also be due to a lack of software support – if security updates are no longer available, the end of the life cycle is inevitable, Dataport’s Camper explained. This must be taken into account in the planning. A supposedly low price with only three years remaining may be much more expensive than a more expensive device with an eight-year lifespan.
Eight year lifespan for IT equipment?
Tobias Stahl called for sustainability to play a bigger role in the administrative logic: Until now, repairs have been carried out if it was economical according to depreciation rules – which leads to many devices actually being replaced rather than repaired. This would increase the ecological footprint unnecessarily. Pratham Karkare of the IT remanufacturer ReBeau offered some hope. He emphasized that the ecosystem for reprocessing and reuse of IT equipment is already well developed in Germany, making not only a second, but often a third or fourth use possible. Other discussants at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival were silent about whether this could really be a solution for schools with hundreds of thousands of devices.
(Yes)
