Accenture's fifth annual global e-government study

state and local governments and then rolled out
across the country. This approach stresses the
importance of synergies for eGovernment in a federal
state. There are more than 7,000 government
portals and sites in Germany across all layers of
the federal system, as well as hundreds of different
software solutions for the various online services.
To avoid duplicating effort and to save costs,
Deutschland-Online wants to capitalize on the
experience of the BundOnline 2005 initiative.
The BundOnline 2005 program itself has been
refreshed through a new action plan, Masterplan
for Information Society 2006, which was released in
December 2003. The specific near-term eGovernment
goals include implementing at least 50 percent
of all Deutschland-Online goals, implementing
e-procurement for all federal bids by 2005 and
implementing an online form management system
in 2004 and 2005.
Despite Germany’s slow advance in 2003, selected
German services made noticeable improvements. For
example, the Federal Insurance Office receives insurance
companies’ applications for federal subsidies
to private pension plans online and processes them
in an integrated electronic workflow. To protect the
sensitive personal information within the transactions,
data is encrypted and access is restricted to
registered users.
The eGovernment discussion in Germany is often
dominated by the call for security, legal certainty,
and data privacy, which are largely believed to be
achievable only through the use of smart card–based
digital certificates. If more pragmatic approaches
are not feasible, such smart cards will be key to the
availability of transactional eGovernment services
in Germany. Within the government program
Information Society 2006, smart cards will play a
central role going forward. The government plans
to give job cards containing employee data to
40 million employees in 2004. A total of 70 million
health cards is expected to be distributed by 2006
and a digital passport is planned for 2008. All of
these cards incorporate a digital signature for
security. Their rollout to the public may have the
potential to push Germany back into the front line
of eGovernment innovators.
Germany has strong foundations in eGovernment,
but for the past two years has done little to build
upon them. Additionally, while the country has
improved its focus on customer relationship management
(a historically weak area), it still has more
room for improvement in its customer focus. The
development of the Deutschland-Online program
may lead to a greater level of integration and interoperability
across all levels of government that
reignites the country’s momentum toward greater
eGovernment maturity.
Germany continues to measure progress primarily
by the number of services put online. The secretary
of state, Gottrik Wewer, stated that at the end of the
calendar year 2003, 268 services would be available
online. As of October 2003, 232 out of 440 federal
services were available. Major effort has been put
into improving the online information available to
the public, while in many cases the challenge of
moving complex transactions online is being left to
the last phase of the BundOnline 2005 program. In
addition to measuring progress by comparing action
against plan, citizen surveys asking about service
usability and user friendliness have been implemented
on the Bund portal, www.bund.de.
77