Digitalisation Without Organisational Development: When Public Authorities Only Digitise Their Problems

An application form that still travels through five separate areas of responsibility remains an application form with five separate areas of responsibility. Just faster and more visibly inefficient.

The same pattern has been repeating in many public authorities for years. A process is identified as suitable for digitisation, a form moves from paper to an online portal, a signature is replaced by an electronic one. What results is a digitised process that contains exactly the same breaks, duplicate checks and waiting times as before. The outcome is a digital copy of an analogue problem, not a solved problem. The citizen now fills in an online form instead of submitting a paper one. The application then still passes through the same five stations as before, except that the waiting times between stations are now visibly documented in a digital system.

The desire for more digitalisation among citizens is unbroken. According to a representative Bitkom survey from 2024, 90 per cent of citizens want their city or local authority to pursue digitalisation more vigorously. At the same time, according to a study by the Allensbach Institute in cooperation with the BDI from the same year, only 2 per cent of the medium-sized companies surveyed consider the German administration to be highly capable, while 62 per cent rate it as barely or not capable at all. This gap between expectation and reality is not explained by missing technology alone. It is explained by the order in which authorities approach change.

Structure first, technology second

An IT system cannot dissolve an area of responsibility that was never organisationally clarified. It cannot remove a duplicate check if nobody has decided which of the two checks is superfluous. This is the core of the problem: digitalisation projects are frequently started before the underlying organisation has been understood and, where necessary, changed. The software then reproduces exactly what previously ran on paper, including every detour, every informal consultation and every historically grown duplicate responsibility.

A method that understands first before it changes proceeds differently. It examines structures and areas of responsibility before optimising processes, and it optimises processes before casting them into software. This order may appear to take longer at first glance. It prevents an expensive digital version of an unresolved organisational problem from emerging at the end. Whoever skips this step is not digitising the administration. They are digitising its existing weaknesses and making them more permanent, because they are now fixed into a system architecture that is harder to change than a service instruction.

Why the instinct is understandable nonetheless

The pressure to deliver visible results quickly is real. According to a 2023 McKinsey study, demographic change will lead to more than 1.5 million people leaving the public service due to age by 2030, roughly a third of the approximately 5 million employees. At the same time, PwC Germany and Strategy& forecast in their 2024 analysis that the public sector will be short of at least one million skilled workers by 2030. Under this pressure, a quick digitalisation project often appears to be the most pragmatic way to make visible progress, while a fundamental organisational analysis seems like a loss of time nobody can afford.

The problem: a project that leaves the organisation unchanged ties up exactly the scarce personnel resources that are already lacking, to a process that remains inefficient. The short-term progress is bought at the price of a longer-term setback, because the actual cause of the inefficiency remains and is now additionally anchored in an IT system that cannot easily be changed again. Adjusting the software afterwards typically costs a multiple of what an upfront organisational analysis would have cost.

A look at citizens’ trust

According to a recent forsa survey commissioned by the dbb from 2024, only 27 per cent of respondents believe the state is capable of action and able to fulfil its tasks. This low level of trust does not arise from missing apps or online forms. It arises from the experience that actual processing time and the number of parties involved change little, regardless of whether the application is submitted on paper or digitally. A modern portal with a long processing time even creates additional disappointment, because the expectation of faster processing raised by the digital form is not fulfilled.

This exact relationship between organisational development and digitalisation is a central theme of my book Verwaltungsmodernisierung mit Methode. In it, I describe why a systematic analysis and transformation model, one that understands the structure first and only then optimises the processes, is the actual precondition for lasting digitalisation. Authorities that follow this order experience digitalisation as a tool for already improved workflows. Authorities that reverse it experience digitalisation as an expensive confirmation of existing problems.

What this means in practice

For senior managers in public administration, this means concretely: before any decision for a new specialist IT procedure or portal, it is worth asking whether the underlying process and its associated areas of responsibility have already been examined. Has it been clarified which checking steps are actually necessary and which have grown historically but can no longer be justified professionally? Has the number of parties involved been questioned before it is fixed into a digital workflow? Has it been checked whether a responsibility is still needed at all, or whether it only exists because it was never questioned?

These questions cost time before the actual digitalisation project. They save the considerably greater time that is later spent correcting a system that merely cast an unresolved organisational question into code. Administrative modernisation succeeds where structure and technology are tackled in the right order, not where technology serves as a substitute for the more difficult organisational work. Given the skills shortage and demographic change, hardly any authority can afford to invest its scarce resources twice in the same process, once for digitalisation and a second time for the later correction.