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Digital trends in public administration: Online survey during the conference “Digitaler Staat”

News from Apr. 01, 2020

Which digital trends already influence the work of the administration today, which changes are emerging for the future? Fraunhofer FOKUS and its Competence Center Public IT hope to provide an answer in the recently published “ThemenRadar” by Behörden Spiegel, a monthly national newspaper for the public service.

The debate on the digital transformation of state and society is often dominated by hyped up trends whose long-term effects are overestimated. Regardless of this white noise, it is important to identify the digital trend topics relevant to public administration and to build up expertise at an early stage. In an online survey in the run-up to the conference “Digitaler Staat 2020”, participants were asked about the current and future relevance of 23 digital trends for the work of public administration.

Which digital trends will shape the administration of the future? Particularly relevant to the everyday work of public administration today and in five years’ time, from an administrative perspective, are the topics of IT security, digital files, new forms of work, process design and optimization as well as digital strategies. However, the sustainability of digitalization, process automation, digital administration accesses and data management and strategies are becoming significantly more relevant. Artificial intelligence, cloud, eID, local community digitalization, e-delivery and digital sovereignty are currently playing a minor role in the day-to-day work of the administration, but are expected to evolve very rapidly.

The assessment of the trends also differs between administrative levels. For example, federal employees currently consider the topic of artificial intelligence to be much more important than employees from the states and municipalities. Municipalities, on the other hand, place much greater emphasis on the digitalization of the local community, the implementation of the Online Access Act, the sustainability of digitalization, cloud solutions and the Internet of Things.

The detailed evaluation is available in German on the website of Behörden Spiegel.