Cities and municipalities in Germany are facing a major challenge with their own digitalization – regardless of their geographical location or number of inhabitants. With the ongoing expansion of the gigabit infrastructure, which is also supported by the federal broadband funding program, municipalities are preparing for their digital future. Building on this, the analog processes in the regions must be transformed – into digital applications from the municipalities for the citizens. For this to work in practice, cities and municipalities need a well thought-out and practical digital strategy.
A digital strategy – also known as a digital agenda or smart city strategy – is a multi-year plan that defines the status quo for all aspects of a municipality’s digitalization, specifies desired goals, formulates measures and sets priorities for implementation. The digital strategy can cover all areas of cities or municipalities: Administration, education, mobility, economy, tourism, health, energy as well as culture and leisure.
Many cities and municipalities in Germany have already started to develop and implement their own digital strategies. According to the Smart City Atlas published by Bitkom e.V. and the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE), the strategies mainly include measures for the digitalization of administration (98%), mobility (90%) and the environmental and energy sector (86%).
A digital agenda must address the local characteristics and specific needs of the respective city or municipality. To this end, the municipality should evaluate the current status of its own digitalization, list areas to be digitalized and then derive and prioritize specific measures. This overview of municipal digital policy goals forms the basis for the municipality’s own digital strategy.
Three very different digital strategies will be presented below: the approach of the city of Leipzig, the digital agenda of the city of Arnsberg and the digitalization concept of the inter-municipal cooperation Amt Hüttener Berge. What all three have in common is that they have developed their strategies in parallel with the ongoing, federally funded broadband expansion in order to be able to quickly start digitizing processes and services.
Leipzig: The project-based approach
“There are two strands to digitalization: firstly, the digitalization of the city from within, i.e. the administration. The second is the digitalization of the city within the city. This is where we started the EU project Triangulum with the West Leipzig laboratory in 2015,” explains Dr. Beate Ginzel, Acting Head of the Digital City Department in Leipzig. Since 2015, the west of Leipzig has been an application area for smart city solutions. The Saxon city with a total population of almost 600,000 is pursuing a project-based approach: “The West Leipzig project was our laboratory space for entering the Smart City process. This resulted in many integrated individual projects that are making an exemplary contribution to the digitalization of the city of Leipzig,” says Dr Beate Ginzel.
The digitalization of Leipzig West is being supported by the EU project Triangulum as part of the Horizon 2020 programme. Six European cities are involved in the Triangulum project and regularly share their experiences and progress on the road to becoming a smart city. Although the EU project has set a clearly defined spatial framework in the west of the city, the digitization projects have an impact on the whole of Leipzig, where the federally funded broadband expansion is currently progressing. “With digital projects in particular, the measures cannot be limited to just one part of the city, but it has helped to develop initial ideas for a small area,” says Dr. Beate Ginzel.
The digitalization projects in Leipzig are developed and implemented under the leadership of the “Digital City Department” together with the municipal utilities or transport companies, the Leipzig University Competence Centre and the citizens. “Digitalization is a cross-cutting issue in which all of the city’s working groups are involved: Mobility, energy, education and many others. This results in the fields of action in which we want to implement digitalization measures as projects,” says Dr. Beate Ginzel.
One important aspect, for example, is the introduction of e-government. Leipzig citizens can already apply for civil status certificates – such as birth or marriage certificates – online without having to log in. Hotels or owners of vacation apartments can report the guest tax collected via a profile created in the citizen portal. Citizens can access these and future administrative services of the City of Leipzig via Amt24, the service portal of the Free State of Saxony. Leipzig is thus beginning to implement the Online Access Act (OZG) passed in 2017. The OZG obliges the federal and state governments to link the numerous existing administrative portals with each other and to merge them into a portal network by 2022.
Leipzig is also structurally adapting its administration to the digital age: In April 2019, the “Economy and Labor” department was renamed “Economy, Labor and Digital” and the new “Digital City” department was established within it. “Shaping the digital transformation requires overarching structures and committees within the administration. Following a decision by the mayors, we have developed a concept for the new “Digital City” department,” explains Dr. Beate Ginzel. With this department, Leipzig has a central coordination point for all digitalization and innovation topics in the city.
Tips for digital strategies from Dr. Beate Ginzel, Leipzig:
“Digitalization is an incredibly complex process. But it helps a lot to discuss the associated risks and fears and put them into perspective when you have specific projects in mind. Digital change in general is too big and too difficult to grasp. In order to achieve something, measures should be made as concrete as possible and then implemented in individual projects. It’s important to simply get started.”
Arnsberg: The stakeholder-oriented strategy
“Digitalization offers enormous opportunities for citizens, companies and local authorities – especially in rural regions,” says Karin Glingener, Head of the “Digital City” department of the city of Arnsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia. In order not to miss out on these opportunities, the town of 78,300 inhabitants in the Hochsauerland district is expanding its broadband supply with the help of the federal funding programme and at the same time developing a digitalization strategy.
© City of Arnsberg.
In September 2015, the city of Arnsberg presented its digital agenda #ARNSBERGdigital and published it in the form of the green paper “Digital Agenda 2015-2020”. Since then, the strategy has been further developed: “The stakeholder-oriented Digital Agenda Arnsberg from 2015 was updated as part of the Arnsberg 2030 strategy,” says Karin Glingener. However, the focus of the Digital Agenda has remained the same:
“Improving the digital infrastructure in the city of Arnsberg and providing and supporting digital services is also a key objective of the “Arnsberg 2030″ strategy.”
The measures from Arnsberg’s Digital Agenda are implemented one after the other. The more benefits a project generates, the higher it is prioritized. So far, the city in the Sauerland region has set up 50 free Wi-Fi hotspots in retail and catering outlets and programmed a citizen app that allows citizens to view public meeting documents from the city. In addition, services such as borrowing e-books, advance ticket sales for cultural events and registering for nursery or daycare can be done digitally. For all projects, the city first consults citizens, associations and companies in order to be able to take suggestions or doubts into account during implementation. “After all, new technical solutions are not an end in themselves, but must serve the citizens and contribute to improving the quality of life and location,” explains Karin Glingener.
The next step is for the city of Arnsberg’s digital citizen portal to go online. “The service portal, which also includes an e-payment function, is now entering the final test phase,” says Karin Glingener: “The portal will then be successively expanded to include more and more services. For example, the following services are already available: applying for housing benefit, a resident parking permit and a family card, requesting documents from the register of births, marriages, civil partnerships and deaths or business registration, deregistration and re-registration.” The citizens’ portal will thus become the central service platform for Arnsberg residents in the future.
The city of Arnsberg has set up an open data portal so that further digitization projects can be developed independently of the digital measures that the city is implementing itself. City data is uploaded to this portal in open formats for further processing. This includes digital information on the city’s budget plans and annual financial statements, GEO data on development plans and other data sets from the city administration. Arnsberg thus offers private companies the opportunity to visualize the freely available data in a user-friendly way or to integrate it into new applications for citizens. In this way, the private sector can also contribute to making Arnsberg a digital city.
© City of Arnsberg.
Tips for digital strategies from Karin Glingener, Arnsberg:
“It is difficult to make comparisons between municipalities in Germany, as the conditions for the municipalities are very different. However, mutual learning from other municipalities is very pronounced within the municipal family, particularly in the area of digitalization. Municipalities need support in order to generate added value and promote the digital expertise and networking of local stakeholders. The exchange with other municipalities is therefore a clear opportunity.”
Amt Hüttener Berge: The three-stage digitization process
“From the digital agenda to the digital workshop to the digital region.” This is the guiding principle behind the digitalization of the Hüttener Berge district in Schleswig-Holstein. The association of 16 municipalities has thus divided the digitalization process into three stages. “We are currently in the digital workshop. The digital agenda has been completed,” says Andreas Betz, District Director of the Hüttener Berge district. From August 2017 to May 2018, around 200 stakeholders were involved in the formulation and adoption of “Hüttener Berge’s Digital Agenda” – including representatives from the administration and the population. Since August 2018, the “digital workshop” has been working on implementing the formulated measures. The Hüttener Berge office is being supported in this process by the European project “CORA – COnnecting Remote Areas with digital infrastructure and services” from the “Interreg IV B North Sea Region Program (2014-2020)”. The northern German office is benefiting from the exchange of experience with 17 other European partners and the joint development of digital solutions.
These inspirations from Europe are combined with the wishes of the residents in the Hüttener Berge office. Administrative staff and citizens can regularly make suggestions in several feedback rounds. “In this way, we ensure that the services will also meet the needs of the users later on,” says Andreas Betz: “The population was able to provide information on what they wanted right from the start. The first thing that was expressed was the urgent request for a central mobility portal. The “Hütti macht mobil” portal therefore has top priority.” In future, users will be able to use the portal to suggest efficient travel connections, rent the council’s own electric cars – known as Dörpsmobile – or organize carpooling.
The heart of the future digital region Amt Hüttener Berge is to be “Hüttis Bürgerportal”. Residents can log in there and gain access to digital services. These include citizen services such as applying for an ID card or reporting water meter readings. Events in the region and documents from municipal council meetings are also listed here for users. The mobility portal will also be accessible via this platform. The prerequisite for digital citizen services is fast internet – both for the administration and for the citizens of the Hüttener Berge district. For this reason, a fast broadband network was expanded in the region between 2017 and 2018 with financial support from the federal broadband funding program.
© Amt Hüttner Berge.
The Amt Hüttener Berge places particular emphasis on citizen participation. As part of the digitization process, but also beyond that, the office management is interested in the opinions of the citizens. For example, the participation platform “Hütti wir machen mit” is intended to gather suggestions and opinions from citizens. “We want to establish a cultivated culture of discussion. Every resident of the Hüttener Berge district can log in and express their opinion publicly on this platform,” explains Andreas Betz. Wishes, criticism and surveys can then be communicated and initiated online via this platform. “We hope that this will also encourage younger citizens to have their say and help shape things.”
The support among the residents for the digitalization of the Hüttener Berge district is certainly strong: “I’ve received emails saying: It’s great what you’re doing, you’re moving our region forward. Of course we’re very pleased about that,” says Andreas Betz.
© Amt Hüttner Berge.
Tips for digital strategies from Andreas Betz, Amt Hüttener Berge:
“First of all, local authorities should get external help and draw up a multi-year plan. This must include all planned measures and be developed together with the population and politicians. Involving citizens in the planning is very important. Next, the measures must be prioritized together with politicians and the administration and then worked through with interim goals.
As the development of our citizen portal is funded on the basis of a cooperation agreement with the state of Schleswig-Holstein, all public administrations from
The federal state has the opportunity to offer the portal as a service for its own citizens. The same applies to the “Hütti wir machen mit” participation platform as soon as it goes online. We therefore invite all districts, cities, authorities and municipalities in Schleswig-Holstein to adopt the jointly developed citizen portal and participation platform and adapt it to their own look and feel.”
All three digital strategies clearly show that the successful digitalization of a city or municipality is not a question of its size. Even small administrations can develop a suitable digital agenda and implement digitalization projects in order to take further steps towards becoming a digital municipality.