When visits to government offices become a thing of the past
Vehicle registration no longer begins at the counter. No more waiting slips, no more re-entering data that has long been on file. Instead, a single digital service brings the entire process together, verifies identities and retrieves the necessary data from existing sources. The end result is not a trip to the local vehicle registration office, but a process that begins online and is completed online.
This is what day-to-day administration could look like if location-independent services were consistently organised digitally and centrally. The BDI’s ‘EinfachStaat’ agenda explicitly cites vehicle registration as an example. Driving licences, housing benefit, BAföG and parental allowance are also among the procedures which, in the opinion of the expert group, could be consolidated to a greater extent, provided they can be carried out entirely digitally and have no mandatory local connection.
This is the core of the agenda: public administration should not merely be accessible online. It should function more simply, quickly and reliably.
A reform paper for the digital state
The Federation of German Industries (BDI) convened the ‘Modern State’ expert group in the summer of 2025. Representatives from government, business and academia were tasked with drawing up recommendations to modernise the state and public administration structurally. The aim: an efficient, digital state that is citizen- and business-oriented, with clearer responsibilities, fewer interface problems and a culture that enables pragmatic decision-making.
Nadja Kwaß-Benkow, Director of Digital Government at Materna, is also a member of this expert group. Her perspective forms part of an area of the agenda that may sound technical at first glance but is crucial for the practical modernisation of public administration: standardisation, interoperable systems and digital tools that can work together across federal levels.
The agenda brings together the reduction of bureaucracy, law-making, administrative organisation, data flows and IT architectures. The conclusion is clear: analogue complexity does not become simpler simply by being transferred to an online form.
The gap between aspiration and reality
Although the digital transformation of public administration is making progress, it is still falling short of expectations. According to the Agenda, around 349 of 579 administrative services are currently available online. Only 165 of these are available nationwide across all local authorities. 230 services required under the Online Access Act have not yet been digitised at all. Although particularly popular procedures, such as parental allowance or marriage registration, are partially available online, their digital use has so far been limited. According to the report, only 13 per cent of citizens have applied for an administrative service online to date. 90 per cent would like to see things move faster.
This gap is particularly noticeable for businesses. The Agenda describes them as the ‘power users’ of the public administration. They are in regular contact with public authorities regarding permits, reporting obligations, grants, supporting documents or information from registers. An efficient public administration is therefore a key factor in their choice of location.
In the paper, the BDI makes it clear that the causes of the lack of digitalisation do not lie solely in a lack of technology. Complex procedures, fragmented responsibilities, inconsistent IT solutions and case-by-case assessments slow processes down. Added to this is an administrative mindset that adapts digital processes to existing regulations, rather than the other way round.
Cultural change in the public sector
A central theme of the agenda is therefore the shift from a ‘risk-averse’ mindset to a culture of enabling action. Public authorities should be able to make use of greater scope for interpretation. However, this requires political backing, clear responsibilities and a shared understanding that public administration does not merely enforce rules, but enables social and economic action.
The Agenda highlights centres of expertise, specialisation, cross-departmental cooperation and a greater practical focus in legislation and enforcement. Procedures should no longer be optimised in isolation, but viewed in context. Where checks are carried out twice, evidence is requested multiple times or responsibilities remain unclear, delays arise that cannot be resolved by technical means alone.
Standards as a prerequisite
At the heart of the Agenda’s major reform concepts lies a central element: standardisation. Many public authorities have developed their own solutions in recent years. Some are efficient, others have evolved over time, but many are only compatible to a limited extent. This results in a patchwork system in which digital services do exist but do not integrate sufficiently with one another.
Nadja Kwaß-Benkow points to standards as a fundamental prerequisite for digital capability: “The aim must be to ensure that greater standardisation enables maximum interoperability between solutions currently in use, as well as the ability to switch between them.”
If public authorities wish to switch solutions or reuse them, they must not become permanently locked into individual architectures. And if citizens and businesses are to be able to use public services seamlessly, the underlying systems must be high-performing.
The agenda therefore calls for the federal government, the Länder and local authorities to agree on binding interfaces, standards and requirements within the IT Planning Council. The Deutschland-Stack, as a sovereign national technology platform, is also cited as a point of reference. Competition between solutions and providers should be maintained. What is crucial is not uniformity at any cost, but compatibility.
Enter data only once
Closely linked to this issue is the modernisation of registers. Germany has hundreds of registers. Many of these are either not linked at all or are not linked in such a way that they can be used for digital procedures without a change of medium. For citizens and businesses, this means that information has to be entered again and again, even though it is already available to the administration.
The Agenda contrasts this with the ‘once-only’ principle. Data should only need to be entered once and should then be usable between authorities in a legally compliant manner. This requires modern registers, interoperable interfaces, clear legal frameworks and technical infrastructures such as the National Once-Only Technical System.
The Agenda therefore describes register modernisation as a key project. This is because an application that is submitted online but is subsequently checked manually and then has to be forwarded or supplemented with additional evidence remains only partially digital.
The law must become digitally traceable
Legislation is also coming under scrutiny. The agenda calls for the law to be made more digitally compatible. This includes the ‘Law as Code’ approach. This means that legal rules are structured in such a way that they can be applied unambiguously in digital processes.
One example is semantic interoperability. Terms must be defined across legal fields in such a way that digital systems can process them reliably. Where the same word has different meanings in different laws, friction arises in digital enforcement.
Take the word ‘child’, for example. According to the German Civil Code (BGB), even an adult can become a child, namely through adoption. A baby, on the other hand, is its mother’s child from birth. Under the Youth Protection Act, a young person is no longer a child at the age of 14, yet under the BGB, anyone under 18 is regarded as a minor for whom the parents are responsible. In tax law, on the other hand, children can be taken into account up to the age of 25 – how is an AI supposed to make sense of this?
For humans, this context can often be explained. For automated processes, however, clear terms and binding standards are required.
The agenda calls for this digital readiness to be taken into account in the legislative process, as only then can digital systems operate in such a way that public authorities have the leeway to make decisions pragmatically. Without interoperable systems, the digital state remains fragmented. With them, public administration can operate as a coherent infrastructure across levels, departments and specialist procedures.
