Based in Berlin, Michael Tschichholz is director of Germany's Competence Center for Electronic Government and Applications. During his visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., for the 2007 Lac Carling Congress, he sat down with senior writer Lisa Williams to discuss Germany's ambitious e-Government 2.0 program and the headway they're making on their national ID strategy. Tschichholz also believes there's a lot to be learned, by politicians and citizens alike, from Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion. Excerpts from their conversation follow.
Q. What is Germany's e-Government 2.0 program all about and how does it relate to the national ID card strategy?
A. The idea behind the e-Gov 2.0 program is to set up the required infrastructure to conduct electronic business and electronic government efficiently. This required first that the citizen be identified by electronic means for government and business processes.
There was long discussion in Germany regarding electronic signatures. But these talks have not yet led to the use of electronic signatures because the infrastructure is expensive and nobody wants to pay for it. Yet, an implementation for this exists, and there's an idea that this could be aligned with banking cards.
In the context of the e-Gov 2.0 program, they decided to put electronic credentials on the new ID cards, which each German has, in addition to passports.
In Germany, you can use your ID card to cross borders in all of Europe and it contains your home address and your age, name, etc. This card will be replaced by a similar card which has an electronic chip on it that contains your credentials in order to conduct government and business processes. This would be a good basis to establish further electronic processes for businesses and for transactions regarding government.
The next important thing they want to have is an electronic address for citizens, so that documents which are being provided by the government can be delivered to this e-address.
In addition to this electronic address, we'd provide a data safe where you can store documents. Access to these documents could be provided as needed for public servants, or you can set up electronic means for business processes and administration. Provisioning of this infrastructure should be made by private companies that offer mail systems.
After e-Gov 2.0, we have identified a further eight processes which would support businesses as well as these above-mentioned processes, and there will be funding to implement them. For example, ships going into the harbour: processes such as this would be made more efficient for government and customs officials.
Q. Where would the funding come from for these processes?
A. The funding would come from the German national government. In addition to e-Gov 2.0, there is a national program called Deutsch Online (Germany Online), which has been defined at all levels of administration: at the national, state and municipal levels.
Five major projects have been identified. One would be to improve standards, as standards for e-government architecture have been defined, as well as standards of general concepts on how technology should be used for e-government, in addition to the basic standards. There is a set of application-specific standards called the xml standards for public administration, and further defined standards for citizen registration.
For example, this would make it easier for the citizen to change their information when moving from one city to another. When they move to the new city, there's an electronic process in place to get the data from the old city to the registry of the new city, so the whole process has been simplified. Based on the same principles, standards have been defined for other processes like birth and death registration.
Step by step, major processes will be standardized, and we are currently working on a service map for Germany, where we'll identify the major processes which need to be standardized, such as moving traditional paper-based processes to re-integrated IT-based processes.
Q. With the introduction of the Germany Online project, how many citizens are accessing services online?
A. The demand from citizens is not big yet; it differs from region to region. If in specific cities there's a good advertisement for e-government, and there's a good infrastructure, then citizens accept electronic use of services from the city. This is the case in Hamburg, Berlin, and also in regions that are quite far developed, but this could not be said for Germany in general. Although the services are being provided, often citizens and even businesses are not aware that these services exist.
It's an advertisement problem, that these target groups don't know what's available, but great improvements have been made to communicate these services. Maybe if we get an electronic ID card, this will bring citizens closer to electronic services because they will have something in their hand which gives them the opportunity to access specific services.
Continued: E-government in 2010
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