There is no doubt that the public sector and its administration are undergoing change. The evolution of public administration from the analog to the digital age represents both an immense opportunity and a complex challenge for modern society. A larger community in the Munich area is in the eye of the storm: with around 25,000 inhabitants, it administers, like so many municipalities in Germany, a diverse, cross-industry and modern population – with analog tools.
The Online Access Act (OAA), as well as the ambitious plan of the Bavarian Council of Ministers to “digitize the most important administrative services across the board by the end of 2020,” underscores the urgency of digitization in municipalities. On the one hand, this urgency demonstrates the absolute will to adapt the way the administration works to the needs of a society that is modernizing as a whole. In the eyes of the office management, however, it also intensifies the following areas of tension:
- There is little clarity about the scope and consequences of digitization.
- Employees are concerned about how work processes and the work environment will change, to the point of fearing that their jobs will be eliminated.
- There is little knowledge about the skills that will be needed in the short to long term at the various levels of administration.
On the basis of these areas of tension, Breitenstein Consulting set up an interdisciplinary team from October 2019 to January 2020, which used our transformation approach in the context of the long-standing cooperation project “Change Management” between Breitenstein Consulting and the LMU Munich to initiate this gigantic change process. Based on our approach of first understanding the transformation holistically in order to develop, implement and anchor it together at a later stage, our team took stock of the municipality’s change architecture.
Our analysis shows: the human factor is crucial! When asked what they value about their workplace, many of the municipal employees responded with the “social factor” and “proximity to citizens”. Associations with digitalization are all the more striking: “anonymity”, “loss of proximity to citizens” and “information overload”. In addition to political/organizational aspects (42%), it is socio-psychological factors (30%) that represent the greatest barriers to digitization, ahead of technical aspects (28%).
Furthermore, our analysis shows that public sector employees often have only a limited understanding of digitization – the idea of “paper freedom” is a prevailing simplistic notion here.
Digitization education and the associated realistic “readiness” for change is therefore the first key. The analysis also shows that there is a lack of clarity as to whether and, if so, how digitization processes can incorporate important social aspects of current work in the public sector. Our many years of experience show that automation can improve the social, communicative aspect of work! Through creative, agile and innovative work.
Creativity, agility, innovation – words that seem foreign in public service. But it is precisely with these principles that we believe we can effectively shape the path of digital transformation in public service. The analysis of the community illustrates that it is precisely such principles, which we have been communicating to our partners for years, that can be a blueprint for public digitalization.
To initiate an effective paradigm shift in which the principles of modernity are applied in the largely analog world of public service, the human factor must be placed at the center. Together with the community, we are therefore embarking on this transformation in order to exploit the full potential of digitalization.
