6 ms·

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

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.

senand 3y ago
I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but alas, it unfortunately is not.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Except it won't be a raspberry pi, because one of the people will have convinced upper management that the load MAY be excessively high so it needs to be a mainframe grade high available cluster that will need to be requisitioned first.
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  Given the project will probably take 10 to 15 years to be completed, honestly, they are probably not wrong. By the time it's ready for production, the latest Raspberry Pi will probably be about as powerful as the fancy cluster.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
brap 3y ago
Yet for some reason Europeans feel so strongly against privitization of public services
- nisa 3y ago
  Most of these shitty online services are already run by private consulting companies that burn your tax money.
  - tormeh 3y ago
    And yet you as an individual has no freedom to choose which company's interface you want to use for the government. You get the government-appointed shitty one.
  - brap 3y ago
    You’re right, but this is not what I mean by privatizing. In this scenario you described, the government has a monopoly and you as a citizen don’t get to opt-out or switch to the competition. You will pay for whatever garbage service they provide you with, unless you want to go to jail. There are no consequences to wasting your tax money. These private consulting companies are just the means to waste it.
    - johneth 3y ago
      Government tends to do what only government can do (e.g. issue passports, driving licenses, file taxes, etc.), and things where natural monopolies exist (water supply, trains, roads). What exactly would you privatise? (read: hand over obscene profits to a rent-seeking private entity).
      - dfox 3y ago
        In the various libertarian ideologies there is the idea that only thing that government needs to do is to “notarize” contracts. This is on the first approximation true, but said government needs to somehow derive the authority to do so. That authority comes from government's ability to somehow disperse violence, which in itself requires quite extensive support infrastructure needed for the government to function. And when such infrastructure has to exist anyway, somehow providing access to it for the citizens is a good idea both politically and economically. Another function of government is, like it or not, in somehow providing legal tender and in the process regulating it. Efficient free markets need fiat medium of exchange, however counterintuitive that might seen. Because otherwise the trading parties would not have any common value reference, and sooner or later the market itself will create something akin to a government and state. Which is well, probably how the idea of governments and states started some thousands of years ago.
Escapado 3y ago
For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes. Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is, is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12 random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need to file them and simply not show them to me). And last time I called the tax office the woman on the phone told me she can't answer a specific question I had because she would need to get my printed out file for that from the cabinet down the hall so I will have to call again later. 27 years. This is where we're at.
- nicbou 3y ago
  Elster is still among the best digital products Germany has to offer. Pretty much everything else is worse.
  - jona-f 3y ago
    Can anyone tell me why it is named after a bird known for stealing? Is this a deliberate joke? How did that get approved?
    - radiator 3y ago
      It is an acronym, ELektronische STeuerERklärung
- mejutoco 3y ago
  I do not disagree that sometimes German bureaucracy is not the most efficient. But. I have used Elster and, while it is true it looks old and overly complicated, it actually works great. You get _a lot_ of very useful warnings about fields that cannot be 0 or must at least be x, based on some other distant field. You can save previous forms and start from them (for recurrent things like VAT quarterly declaration). You can save progress and log in using certificates, change to be notified electronically instead of per physical mail. IMO Elster would be even better if they would _never_ change the number of the fields. If you buy a book about German taxes (I know, fun) they can say fill in field 47, and it it prob now 49 because the fields changed.
jcarrano 3y ago
The part about typing it again by hand and printing it is very real!
- nisa 3y ago
  It's scary - if you apply for government student assistance you can apply online and it get's printed out - they had to employ people for printing! https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-bafoeg-digitalisierung-buerokratie-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-bafoeg...
nisa 3y ago
Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy: It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is usally works like this: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together. Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court. The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures. Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company. To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out. It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken. Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress. For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.
- nicbou 3y ago
  > Another problem is data protection law I want to emphasise this for non-German readers. "Datenschutz!" has become a sort of one-word meme to explain why everything still runs on fax.
  - mousetree 3y ago
    My favourite, taking a photo of a nice outdoor scene with random people in the background, someone will always run up to you shouting "Datenschutz!"
nforgerit 3y ago
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.
- jlangenauer 3y ago
  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.
  - moomin 3y ago
    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.
    - ido 3y ago
      So why are online gov services still so much better in the uk then in Germany?
      - jetbooster 3y ago
        The only cynical solution I can think of is someone is getting obscenely rich by keeping Government Digital running effectively
Jean-Philipe 3y ago
I actually had to work with two German government agencies, digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them. There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle, but no show stoppers. I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.
- nisa 3y ago
  Very happy to hear that! Heard similiar stories but usally it's on a lower level where things can go right more often than not. The bigger the projects the bigger the problems.
- danjac 3y ago
  Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether and create a government digital agency (whether at local or national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov project seems to point the way.
  - nickkell 3y ago
    They have one already, but it's probably not as big: https://digitalservice.bund.de/ https://digitalservice.bund.de/
    - nicbou 3y ago
      I have worked with some of those people, and I can say that the agency is in really good hands.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.
jskherman 3y ago
I believe this is just reality for a lot of Governments with procurement biddings. Just replace here the IT solution with other projects like construction (very profitable or so I hear), mining, office supplies like laptops, and etc. It's such a cliché that I'm already tired at this point. I'm completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil candidates). At least in Germany, it's a lot less blatant.
hit8run 3y ago
Detailed insider information! One detail missing: you forgot fax support.
askonomm 3y ago
Coming from Estonia it is hard to believe how Germany still requires you to show up at government entities. I thought Germany was a very advanced country. I've done everything online for the past 10 or so years, having to only show up to the police to retrieve my new national id card or passport once it's ready, but every other service is entirely online: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/ https://e-estonia.com/solutions/
- patrickk 3y ago
  A lot of the bureaucracy is a badly disguised jobs program. There would be so many people out of work if there was actual work to reform some of these ossified government services.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    None of these people would be out of work, we have more than enough jobs.
odiroot 3y ago
You forgot to mention that McKinsey gets involved.
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
When the wind stops, the form goes offline because the Pi uses 100% renewables. Last month the form went offline during a windy period because the neighbours complained about the wind noise the micro-sized windmill was producing: nimby.
throw71649 3y ago
Actually the whole government digitalization in Germany isn't as backwards as it seems. In some cases it might be even cutting edge solutions. One positive example is for instance Elster, the tax declarations are paperless since years, saving lots of money for tax consultants. But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse. Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also positive example like the Corona app where the design was changed after criticism. That said, I don't think a municipal government has many degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)
BrandoElFollito 3y ago
I am not sure why you keep calling France "Germany :) The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the ministry of health and education. For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start. Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files. Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used it. After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same. I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I have a raspberry pi I do not use. Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an unrelated application with the actual information from school. It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application every year. The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but blocking everything else. Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the deadline. Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10 years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is explitely stated that the app will not be used for identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be used for? I am angry because despite my utter love for my country, anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots who have no idea about what a computer is. I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so that my patriotism can revive.
bafe 3y ago
The buddy thing (and most of the other aspects) is the same for Switzerland. Additionally, you need to integrate 26 systems built with different technologies, one for each Canton. And some of them won't even have an API but will upload the data using CSV in a FTP folder
hansoolo 3y ago
Spot on!
TrackerFF 3y ago
Here's how we would do it in Norway 1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that fixed" 2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK ≈ $0.093 / €0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N different options, with the most obvious being number one - "Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up" 3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting firms. 4. The consultants start to work with the department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the department/directorate is located. 5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months. 6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT department of the directorate. 7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years, until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting firm wins the new bid. 8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to consolidate products. In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the single-page form.

senand 3y ago

I had to laugh out loud. I want to say that's unrealistic, but alas, it unfortunately is not.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

Except it won't be a raspberry pi, because one of the people will have convinced upper management that the load MAY be excessively high so it needs to be a mainframe grade high available cluster that will need to be requisitioned first.

kakwa_ 3y ago
Given the project will probably take 10 to 15 years to be completed, honestly, they are probably not wrong. By the time it's ready for production, the latest Raspberry Pi will probably be about as powerful as the fancy cluster.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

brap 3y ago

Yet for some reason Europeans feel so strongly against privitization of public services

nisa 3y ago
Most of these shitty online services are already run by private consulting companies that burn your tax money.
- tormeh 3y ago
  And yet you as an individual has no freedom to choose which company's interface you want to use for the government. You get the government-appointed shitty one.
- brap 3y ago
  You’re right, but this is not what I mean by privatizing. In this scenario you described, the government has a monopoly and you as a citizen don’t get to opt-out or switch to the competition. You will pay for whatever garbage service they provide you with, unless you want to go to jail. There are no consequences to wasting your tax money. These private consulting companies are just the means to waste it.
  - johneth 3y ago
    Government tends to do what only government can do (e.g. issue passports, driving licenses, file taxes, etc.), and things where natural monopolies exist (water supply, trains, roads). What exactly would you privatise? (read: hand over obscene profits to a rent-seeking private entity).
    - dfox 3y ago
      In the various libertarian ideologies there is the idea that only thing that government needs to do is to “notarize” contracts. This is on the first approximation true, but said government needs to somehow derive the authority to do so. That authority comes from government's ability to somehow disperse violence, which in itself requires quite extensive support infrastructure needed for the government to function. And when such infrastructure has to exist anyway, somehow providing access to it for the citizens is a good idea both politically and economically. Another function of government is, like it or not, in somehow providing legal tender and in the process regulating it. Efficient free markets need fiat medium of exchange, however counterintuitive that might seen. Because otherwise the trading parties would not have any common value reference, and sooner or later the market itself will create something akin to a government and state. Which is well, probably how the idea of governments and states started some thousands of years ago.

Escapado 3y ago

For anyone thinking this is satire: It's suprisingly close to the truth. We have Elster for electronically submitting taxes. Apparently the Elster Project started in 1996. And all it is, is a digital version of the manual tax forms. It's entirely stupid. When I file my taxes I still have to leave out 12 random pages (instead of Elster figuring out that I don't need to file them and simply not show them to me). And last time I called the tax office the woman on the phone told me she can't answer a specific question I had because she would need to get my printed out file for that from the cabinet down the hall so I will have to call again later. 27 years. This is where we're at.

nicbou 3y ago
Elster is still among the best digital products Germany has to offer. Pretty much everything else is worse.
- jona-f 3y ago
  Can anyone tell me why it is named after a bird known for stealing? Is this a deliberate joke? How did that get approved?
  - radiator 3y ago
    It is an acronym, ELektronische STeuerERklärung
mejutoco 3y ago
I do not disagree that sometimes German bureaucracy is not the most efficient. But. I have used Elster and, while it is true it looks old and overly complicated, it actually works great. You get _a lot_ of very useful warnings about fields that cannot be 0 or must at least be x, based on some other distant field. You can save previous forms and start from them (for recurrent things like VAT quarterly declaration). You can save progress and log in using certificates, change to be notified electronically instead of per physical mail. IMO Elster would be even better if they would _never_ change the number of the fields. If you buy a book about German taxes (I know, fun) they can say fill in field 47, and it it prob now 49 because the fields changed.

jcarrano 3y ago

The part about typing it again by hand and printing it is very real!

nisa 3y ago
It's scary - if you apply for government student assistance you can apply online and it get's printed out - they had to employ people for printing! https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-bafoeg-digitalisierung-buerokratie-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/studenten-bafoeg...

nisa 3y ago

Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy: It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is usally works like this: A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together. Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court. The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures. Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company. To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out. It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken. Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress. For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.

nicbou 3y ago
> Another problem is data protection law I want to emphasise this for non-German readers. "Datenschutz!" has become a sort of one-word meme to explain why everything still runs on fax.
- mousetree 3y ago
  My favourite, taking a photo of a nice outdoor scene with random people in the background, someone will always run up to you shouting "Datenschutz!"

nforgerit 3y ago

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.

jlangenauer 3y ago
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.
- moomin 3y ago
  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.
  - ido 3y ago
    So why are online gov services still so much better in the uk then in Germany?
    - jetbooster 3y ago
      The only cynical solution I can think of is someone is getting obscenely rich by keeping Government Digital running effectively

Jean-Philipe 3y ago

I actually had to work with two German government agencies, digitalizing parts of their work flow and it was surprisingly pleasant. The gov employees were super happy I saved them a lot of work and made their daily lives easier. My clients (small software shops) got to set up and maintain the server for them. There was some bureaucracy hurdles my clients had to tackle, but no show stoppers. I think the biggest problem for government agencies is to find a nice software shop that actually cares and delivers value. They usually have no way of telling who will be good and who will rip them off. Gov agencies are so easy to get ripped off and nobody will take responsibility when things go south.

nisa 3y ago
Very happy to hear that! Heard similiar stories but usally it's on a lower level where things can go right more often than not. The bigger the projects the bigger the problems.
danjac 3y ago
Maybe the best way is to avoid these consultancies altogether and create a government digital agency (whether at local or national level). Motivated and well-trained civil servants familiar with the bureaucracy and terminology who can maintain and improve services in the long term. The UK .gov project seems to point the way.
- nickkell 3y ago
  They have one already, but it's probably not as big: https://digitalservice.bund.de/ https://digitalservice.bund.de/
  - nicbou 3y ago
    I have worked with some of those people, and I can say that the agency is in really good hands.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  This is largely impossible in Germany due to government pay rates being a fraction of what a competent person would earn in industry. There is very little flexibility in this due to equality principles. Sports is an exception, so they could fix it if they wanted to.

jskherman 3y ago

I believe this is just reality for a lot of Governments with procurement biddings. Just replace here the IT solution with other projects like construction (very profitable or so I hear), mining, office supplies like laptops, and etc. It's such a cliché that I'm already tired at this point. I'm completely baffled as to why people keep voting these people for over two decades and obeying the vote-buying (when they can easily just keep the money and vote for the better/lesser evil candidates). At least in Germany, it's a lot less blatant.

hit8run 3y ago

Detailed insider information! One detail missing: you forgot fax support.

askonomm 3y ago

Coming from Estonia it is hard to believe how Germany still requires you to show up at government entities. I thought Germany was a very advanced country. I've done everything online for the past 10 or so years, having to only show up to the police to retrieve my new national id card or passport once it's ready, but every other service is entirely online: https://e-estonia.com/solutions/ https://e-estonia.com/solutions/

patrickk 3y ago
A lot of the bureaucracy is a badly disguised jobs program. There would be so many people out of work if there was actual work to reform some of these ossified government services.
- konschubert 3y ago
  None of these people would be out of work, we have more than enough jobs.

odiroot 3y ago

You forgot to mention that McKinsey gets involved.

rad_gruchalski 3y ago

When the wind stops, the form goes offline because the Pi uses 100% renewables. Last month the form went offline during a windy period because the neighbours complained about the wind noise the micro-sized windmill was producing: nimby.

throw71649 3y ago

Actually the whole government digitalization in Germany isn't as backwards as it seems. In some cases it might be even cutting edge solutions. One positive example is for instance Elster, the tax declarations are paperless since years, saving lots of money for tax consultants. But "consumer facing" solutions anyway have some unmovable roadblocks which is privacy for the better and the worse. Ultimately there's still quite some suspicion among most people towards full digitalization. And it's not completely without reason. Every time some new piece of consumer-government Infrastructure is added, CCC is finding at least one very serious bug that isn't fixed for a considerable amount of time - or never. (De-Mail, digital Passport - both probably should be core parts of such solutions anyway) Again, there are also positive example like the Corona app where the design was changed after criticism. That said, I don't think a municipal government has many degrees of freedom for any convenience solution. (So even if anyone is best buddies with an IT shop, it just won't happen)

BrandoElFollito 3y ago

I am not sure why you keep calling France "Germany :) The two organizations in France who specialize in this are the ministry of health and education. For health we have incompatible backend systems for a start. Then there was a large project to digitalize the patient files. Millions of euros flew in, an atrocity was born, nobody used it. After a few years, a brand new project was recreated, millions flew in and another abomination was born. I asked today at the pharmacy if I can use the digitalized version of my prescription (read: a picture I zm invited to take from within the app) and after a moment of reflection to understand what I was asking for they said absolutely not and that the app is crap, completely useless for health. My MD said the same. I am waiting for the next project and will try to get it, I have a raspberry pi I do not use. Education. We have platforms for regions that brings exactly nothing (nobody know what it is for) and in this you have an unrelated application with the actual information from school. It comes from a private company which is comfortably installed in the ministry so they provide the same shitty application every year. The "platform" I mentioned earlier was announced as collaborative and whatnot, yet it crashed on the first day of COVID lockout despite not providing any functionality, but blocking everything else. Ah, our taxes system traditionally crashes the day before the deadline. Ah, our gov't decided to digitalize our identity papers. 10 years after other countries in Europe (I saw the Polish system which is great). But wait! You expected that you could actually use this to identify yourself? Hahahahahah... Sorry. It is explitely stated that the app will not be used for identification purposes. So what the fuck is it expected to be used for? I am angry because despite my utter love for my country, anything related to digitalization is run by complete idiots who have no idea about what a computer is. I would love to be proven wrong by an application that works so that my patriotism can revive.

bafe 3y ago

The buddy thing (and most of the other aspects) is the same for Switzerland. Additionally, you need to integrate 26 systems built with different technologies, one for each Canton. And some of them won't even have an API but will upload the data using CSV in a FTP folder

hansoolo 3y ago

Spot on!

TrackerFF 3y ago

Here's how we would do it in Norway 1. Problem is widely known. Everyone knows it sucks, and people in charge are starting to think "Maybe we should get that fixed" 2. The gov. hires McKinsey to get some strategic advice on the mater. They'll spend hundreds of thousands of NOK (1 NOK ≈ $0.093 / €0.087) , maybe even a couple of million, on the strategic consultants. They'll present the gov. with N different options, with the most obvious being number one - "Yeah fix that problem, here's our report to back that up" 3. Relevant gov. minister will order the correct department or directorate to start the project, whom in turn will take a glance at internal resources, before swiftly reaching out to Accenture, Capgemini, Sopra Steria, and similar IT-consulting firms. 4. The consultants start to work with the department/directorate, where months will be spent on gather specs, planning, project work, and all that. Regular team meetings, flying the consultants out to wherever the department/directorate is located. 5. Implementation starts, after 1-2 years. Depending on the consulting firm, a MVP is presented withing a couple of months. 6. After 2-3 year, the (still minimal) product is ready to be released to the public. Millions of NOK has been spent. The product is officially owned by some product owner in the IT department of the directorate. 7. The consulting firm will work on the project for 5 years, until the contract is either renewed, or some other consulting firm wins the new bid. 8. After 10 years or so, the product is probably completely absorbed by some larger IT-project or portal, designed to consolidate products. In the end, tens and tens of consultants have worked on the single-page form.