Numbers, please! 16 dashes for German e-government
Germany gets a digital ministry and even its own digital eagle – Digitization and e-government have been a tough topic for 35 years.
For the first time, Germany has an independent ministry for digitalization and state modernization with a generous structure and far-reaching powers, led by a CDU politician: shortly after taking office, manager Karsten Wildberger joined the party that appointed him. His claim to “make Germany the driving force behind digitalization in Europe” even preceded him to a certain extent. Even before the grand coalition was formed, but after the break-up of the traffic light coalition in November, an advertising agency presented Germany's digital coat of arms, with which the new ministry adorns its appearance. A look back at digitalization in Germany, with some remarkable figures.
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At the bottom of the homepage of the new Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization (BMDS) is the digital coat of arms, which is also still quite new: a federal eagle made up of 16 lines. The 16 stands for the German federal states, as these and, of course, the local authorities are also involved in the digitization and modernization of the administration. Karsten Wildberger, former manager of the Ceconomy retail group and Vice President of the CDU Economic Council, is to set the pace.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 4.0, Martin Rulsch, Wikimedia Commons)
The extent to which his new party, the CDU, will give him a free hand when it comes to digitalization is an exciting question. Of course, we are not yet able to provide any figures or concrete goals that the new IT giant is pursuing. But there are precursors.
Digital start almost with fiber optic expansion
The CDU's entry into digitalization can be technically traced back to the issue of the broadband network, which was planned by the SPD-led federal government under Schmidt over a period of 30 years in the early 1980s. However, the CDU/CSU won the elections and put a stop to these plans. A talk show during the 1994 federal election campaign became legendary, in which Chancellor candidate Helmut Kohl was asked by TV presenter Hans Meiser about “data highways” and promised a better expansion of the roads for Germany's motorists.
However, Kohl quickly made up ground when he appointed his party colleague Jürgen Rüttgers as super minister for education, science, research, and technology. Rüttgers had previously been chairman of the Enquete Commission “Technology Assessment and Evaluation”, which dealt with new technologies, and was quickly praised as the “Minister of the Future”.
However, his technological feat was not the expansion of data networks, but the Information and Communication Services Act (IuKDG). With the Multimedia Act, Germany was to become a “global pacemaker in the multimedia workshop of the future”, explained Rüttgers. With this legislative package, Germany pioneered the digital signature as a replacement for the paper signature, but it was accepted rather hesitantly. The figures: The entire budget of the Minister for the Future amounted to DM 15.8 billion in the first full year (1995), of which Rüttgers promised to make one billion available for information technology.
He was particularly keen to promote teleworking, which was to reduce car traffic by three to four billion kilometers, with up to 80,000 teleworkers throughout the country who were to travel a maximum of 15 km to the nearest “telehouse”.
(Image:Â Bundesregierung)
Slow response to the emerging Internet
Rüttgers also announced a research council on the future of the Internet. This project eventually became the Enquete Commission “The Future of Media in Business and Society — Germany's Path to the Information Society”, which met from the end of 1995 to mid-1998 and began with the Christian warning (Matthew 24:2): “Not one stone will be left upon another!” Things did not turn out quite so badly for the intended “Perspectives on the Information Society”, as the final report shows (PDF), which is primarily concerned with the desired acceptance of the new technologies. The report soberly states: “The information economy will in all likelihood be the largest and probably only growth market.”
In a special vote, BĂĽndnis 90/Die GrĂĽnen, citing c't, called for the prohibitive access costs to be abolished. The figures: those who used the Internet paid an average of DM 500 per month, of which DM 35 went to the Internet provider and DM 435 to Telekom if there was no local network access.
In retrospect, it turns out that the then SPD leader Gerhard Schröder reacted better than Rüttgers to the growth market: at CeBIT in 2000, he announced an offensive for information literacy in which foreign IT specialists were to be brought into the country with a “green card”. Here, too, it is interesting to look at the figures: with 13,300 green cards, the campaign was rather unsuccessful; according to the industry association Bitkom, the demand was four times as high.
First digital eagle named Findulin
But Schröder had scored with it. After this PR campaign at CeBIT, Rüttgers, now the top candidate in North Rhine-Westphalia, declared his priorities: “Instead of Indians using computers, our children must use computers”. The CDU campaign could not win any ground at all under the conceivably clumsy shortening of his PR strategists to “Children instead of Indians”. At the time, Germany was a cosmopolitan country -- and quite hip: under Chancellor Schröder, the campaign “Deutschland schreibt sich mit de” was launched to boost Internet use. For the first time, the federal eagle mutated into a digital emblem, called Findulin. The “blue federal crow” was not particularly successful.
(Image:Â Bundesregierung)
What was that again, with no stone left unturned? We skip over the years under Merkel, which have already been discussed in more detail in a missing link, and thus also the former Minister for Internet and Transport Alexander Dobrindt, who is now the political head of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). This brings us promptly to a digital expert who was really enthusiastic about the slogan “no stone left unturned”.
It is Lars Klingbeil, who raved about the next Enquete Commission “Internet and Digital Society” and saw it as a bulwark against the “surprise success of the Pirate Party”. It met from May 2010 to April 2013 and emphasized the principle of net neutrality and private copying. It called for the appointment of a minister of state for digitalization across all parties. At the end of the Commission's work, Klingbeil praised the experiments with online citizen participation.
Today, he is Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor and has to release the money that his cabinet colleague Wildberger needs to tackle the digital transformation that is still necessary. We can't wait to see what the figures look like.
(mki)
