The inefficiencies of Europe’s paper-based bureaucracies are legendary. During the covid pandemic, German health authorities demanded that test centres print and fax results to them, only to then type them back into a computer. Many Spaniards give up on the maze of forms entirely, instead hiring a gestor, a kind of professional bureaucracy-wrangler. Governments mostly want to get online, and the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery fund was aimed partly at helping them. But paper habits are hard to quit.
Their time, however, is up. “If politicians don’t digitalise the administration now, they will not be able to implement policy in the future,” warns Ann Cathrin Riedel of NExT, an e-government advocacy group. Laggards struggle to learn from countries that have got too far ahead to be comparable. In Estonia digicrats have run out of things to digitalise: couples can now divorce online, a reform that might give divorce lawyers elsewhere a heart attack.
Luckily, a new contender has more applicable lessons for the slowpokes: Greece. The country has long been a byword for Kafkaesque bureaucracy. But between 2018 and 2024 its scores on several measures of digital public services rose from among the worst in Europe to about average. On November 24th Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the Greek finance minister and former architect of the country’s digital transformation, visited Karsten Wildberger, who as Germany’s digital minister has taken on the Herculean task of weaning the country off the fax machine. On his return to Athens Mr Pierrakakis met Boris Rhein, prime minister of the German state of Hesse, who had come on a fact-finding mission.
The Germans will have taken away three broad lessons. The first is that government must have a strategy for redesigning its own processes to take advantage of digitalisation. There is no point focusing on the technology alone. “A common mistake is to put legacy processes into IT systems. You are essentially digitising chaos,” says Diomidis Spinellis, a former government official, now with the Athens University of Economics. Germany’s landmark digital-access law of 2017 focused too little on what happens beyond the screen.
The second lesson is to overcome administrative and regional silos. Each ministry or province has its own processes, systems and pride. On coming to office as prime minister in 2019, Kyriakos Mitsotakis gave a very strong mandate to his digital minister. “Many people went to bed on the day after the election and woke up as employees of the digital ministry,” says Mr Pierrakakis, who could move whole IT departments from other ministries under his control. With that, not just the strategy but the implementation of Greece’s digital transformation was in his hands.
The third lesson is to harvest the low-hanging fruit and not try to find solutions for everything from the start. Germany’s aim to digitalise all services gave equal priority to the ubiquitous process for citizens to register at a new address and the specialised process for applying to run a nuclear power plant. When the city of Berlin attempted to transform its filing system from paper to bytes, it created a digital file with over 1,000 features, causing repeated delays. “Find the pain points, and work on those,” argues Mr Spinellis. Digital firms use agile processes: take frequent incremental steps, review and adjust. But that is not how governments usually work.
If Athens is too far away for your digital fact-finding mission, try Berlin. Had it been a country, it might once have ranked even below Greece. Its new chief digital officer is Martina Klement, a pragmatic lawyer from Bavaria. She is implementing some of the same steps Greece took, with remarkable success. Things that used to be frustrating, such as getting an appointment to register one’s address after moving house, are now digital and easy. More than 400 services are online, with the most common ones digitalised first. Many Berliners are so surprised that digital offerings are available, they fail to use them. “We have to do campaigning now, to encourage them,” says Ms Klement. Backward Europe should see this as a call to action. If Berlin can digitalise, anywhere can.■
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