Materna honours up-and-coming talent with the Graduate Award

The IT group Materna has recognised three forward-looking bachelor’s and master’s theses by students focusing on the digitalisation of public administration. With the Graduate Award, Materna is now, for the third time, supporting up-and-coming talent committed to public administration. The winners received prize money of up to 3,000 euros for first place for their outstanding theses. Materna presented the Graduate Award as part of the digital Berlin User Day on 2 March 2022.

“We present the award to students who are already developing creative ideas at university on how we can further drive forward the digitalisation of public administration,” explains Michael Hagedorn, Head of the Public Sector Division at Materna. “At Materna, we have been working intensively on digital solutions for public administration for many years. This comprehensive transformation affects society as a whole. That is why it is important to us to draw on specialist ideas and inspiration for innovative solutions.”

Since 2020, Materna has been presenting the Graduate Award to outstanding final-year projects by students focusing on innovations in the public sector. This year’s winners explored the Online Access Act (OZG), self-managed identities and perceptions of digitalisation from the perspective of public sector staff.

The award-winning theses

First place – and with it a prize of 3,000 euros – went to Deborah Nafz from the University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer for her Master’s thesis in the Public Administration programme. Using a case study on the digitalisation of the Rhineland-Palatinate Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, the public administration scholar examined the influence of individual, technological and structural factors on the attitudes of administrative staff towards the digitalisation of public administration.

The runner-up, Dirk Wegener, has a background in the field and studied Business Informatics via distance learning at Wismar University of Applied Sciences, specialising in IT management and IT consultancy. In his Master’s thesis, he outlines a new approach showing how self-managed identities enable users to control their own identity data, share it or restrict access to it. Under the Online Access Act (OZG), the federal government, the Länder and local authorities must fully digitise a total of over 570 administrative services by the end of 2022 and require secure user or service accounts to do so. He will donate the prize money of 2,000 euros to local organisations.

Third place and a prize of 1,000 euros went to Taner Ünalgan from Ruhr University Bochum. He completed the Master’s programme in Management and Regulation of Labour, Economy and Organisation at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Through expert interviews with representatives from the cities of Dortmund and Schwerte, as well as the German Association of Towns and Municipalities, he investigated how the Online Access Act (OZG) and its requirements are received and assessed at local authority level, and what impact it has on local authorities’ digitalisation strategies.