The German Administration Services Directory (DVDV) lists electronically available eGovernment services and fulfils an important need in terms of creating a secure and reliable communication infrastructure, based exclusively on open Internet protocols and allowing cross-organisational, paperless processes. In operation since January 2007, it has helped more than 5,200 German civil registration agencies to save more than € 1 million per month. Worldwide, it is one of the first and largest standardised Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementations in the government area, and was made possible through unique cooperation between various levels of government and sectors in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Policy Context

Within eGovernment, attention is increasingly paid to paperless and cross-organizational processes because these yield a maximal potential for reduced administrative burden and cost-savings. So far, possibilities were limited because of the lack of a reliable, secure and universally available addressing service. An effective addressing service should be an universal one – like the universal phone books. For this, all levels and sectors of governments have to join efforts. As in Germany IT is traditionally being run independently on each level, such co-operations were hard to establish in the past. The “Deutschland-Online” initiative by the federal and state governments, attempted to change this (see www.deutschland-online.de). The DVDV is a successful example of this new co-operation spirit. In addition, it is a prerequisite for effective electronic-only transactions, which are increasingly required by formal acts of parliament. Through its first supported service, running since Jan. 1st, 2007, the DVDV enables the electronic interchange required by the Civil Registration Framework Act of 2002. The second application area, scheduled for operation in late summer of 2007, will be supporting the implementation of the electronic tax identification number, also required by law (§139 AO). In the European policy context, the DVDV supports the free movement of services as it makes eGovernment services easily available to all users in government and the private sector. In addition, the DVDV will support the implementation of the electronic services as mandated by the EU Services directive (2006/123/EC). The DVDV is in line with the i2010 priority area Nr. 2 “Efficient and Effective Government” through reducing the administrative burden on businesses and citizens. Following the i2010 policy, it uses open standards and open Internet protocols as agreed upon by the WS-I and OASIS SOA-standardization efforts.

Description of target users and groups

The DVDV is an infrastructure service. Its immediate target group consists of all agencies and their providers which offer electronic services on the basis of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This means there are about several 10,000 immediate organizational users, given that Germany is made up of one federal level, 16 state governments and more than 14,000 local governments.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The DVDV’s innovative management model assured financing, rapid development and solved the puzzle of infrastructure investments (ex-ante financing by IT-departments) vs. usage-fees (ex-post financing by sectoral governments as users) by balancing responsibilities and financing duties equally across levels and sectors. In the implementation phase, only four states and the federal government financed and organized the development of the DVDV, carried out by three North-German public/private IT-providers. The results were given at no cost to all other governments (“one-for-all” principle). Quality assurance was provided by a working group within the Deutschland-Online initiative. Changing over to the operational phase was successfully done by establishing a central co-ordination body at the Federal IT Agency and distributing the production servers throughout German States. Central costs are shared by all governments according to their size. A small management group is charged to oversee maintenance and further development of the DVDV. The moderate costs of adding new services are financed by those sectors requesting them. Costs of the decentralised systems are covered locally through agreements between the providers and IT departments. Multi-channel issues: The DVDV is a crucial basis for delivering services on multiple channels. The DVDV comprises agencies, services and providers on logical levels, allowing each agency to specify their services and the respective technical channels. An important design feature of the DVDV is that an organisation can store multiple types of a service implementation supporting various service formats, where needed. Naturally, the DVDV itself will always have to be queried electronically. If offline channels of delivery are offered, they will have to be “represented” electronically via a case-worker in a front office - which is of course sub-optimal from an automation-focussed point of view but sometimes needed in real world scenarios. Current plans of advanced one-stop-government services, in which a “single point of contact” will pull up information and services from many different sources and in multiple channels, will require an electronic directory such as the DVDV. This is why it is intended to use the DVDV in implementing functions of the point of single contact called for by the EU Services Directive (2006/123/EC, Art. 5). To conclude, the DVDV is an infrastructure component which has been designed with the possibility to support multi-channel delivery in mind. As far it is used, though, it can only be accessed by electronic means as this was the purpose and need filled by its creation. It is not a human-readable look-up tool for services etc., but instead a device with which applications are able to address eGovernment services.

Main results, benefits and impacts

The impact of the DVDV is extremely large. Whereas the development costs spent on the project between 2004 and 2006 were rather small, amounting to 300 TEUR, it has created savings of more than one million EUR per month since its operational start on January 1st 2007. Considering the 250 TEUR needed for maintenance and support per year, this service has proven to be of high value. So far, the savings have been accrued in the area of civil registration alone, the sector for which the DVDV is being used first. On the efficiency dimension, which according to the eGEP (see www.rso.it/egep) framework measures the financial & organisational value, “cashable financial gains” and “better organisational and IT architectures” compute as follows. - Cashable financial gains: all civil registration agencies exchange between at least 500.000 and up to 1 million messages per month. The cost-benefit analysis (cf. Document of the German Parliament 110/05 of 16.2.2005) concluded that the electronic handling costs 0,38 EUR per transaction, as opposed to 2,70 EUR in the old, paper-based method. The reduction of administrative burden is at least a person day per month per agency, assuming monthly labour costs of 3.750 EUR for personnel handling the data and taking into account 5246 civil registration agencies. In some agencies, savings are estimated to be even higher, up to two or three working days per month. All in all, since Jan 1st 2007 until the end of May 2007 (five months), approximately 3 Mio messages have been sent using the DVDV, e.g. 600.000 per month so far. On average, the actual savings per month was 1,392 Mio EUR throughout the first five months of this year! - Better organisational and IT architecture: the IT service providers for civil registration are now using a nation-wide standardized infrastructure for exchanging messages. For new services, no new investments have to be made. Neither the tax administration or the state of Saxony, who already added already services to the DVDV in the first half of 2007, needed to invest in a proprietary directory. 11 more services are scheduled for implementation at the moment, indicating the sustained success of the DVDV. On the effectiveness dimension of the eGEP, the DVDV has achieved proven reductions of administrative burden. Directly, administrative personnel is relieved completely of handling paper-based processes. Indirectly, citizens profit from this service because they no longer have to visit two agencies, both at the old and new addresses, but only one. In fact, citizens profited from this already for some time; but at the cost of the agencies which still had to handle all paper processes in the back office. The electronic data interchange made possible through the DVDV now allows a significant decrease of errors and thus creates a lot higher quality of data. Inquiries by business to the citizen register by business are now answered faster and better. Similar savings such as these mentioned in the area of civil registrations are to be expected in all other sectors which will make use of the DVDV. Even if the development costs for both the successfully finished OSCI-XMeld and OSCI-Transport projects, which make up the complete architecture, are entered with roughly 2 Mio EUR development costs in the equation, the ROI of the complete project was achieved after three months of operation. Because of this, it can be safely assumed that the DVDV has been one of the most cost-effective E-Government solutions which has ever been realised in Germany. Innovation: Many experts agree that real savings in eGovernment can only be achieved if cross-organizational and paperless processes are installed on the basis of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Whereas secure message exchange protocols are at hand, the lack of an infrastructure to reliably address the different actors has remained a major reason for failures. The DVDV solves this problem through one of the first and globally largest standardized Service Oriented infrastructure. Whereas only plans and ideas of addressing SOA-components are available elsewhere, Germany now has such a component running successfully with nation-wide coverage. It uses completely open international standards and standards agreed by German governments in the federal SAGA Guidelines (http://www.kbst.bund.de/saga), such as LDAP, WSDL, X.509/ISIS-MTT, OSCI-XMeld and OSCI-Transport. It is noteworthy that the DVDV technically took advantage of the same design principles as the Internet: delivering availability and performance through co-operation and sharing, not through one large-scale system. The system consists of a central database, running on a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server, and a series of decentralized databases updated via replication. In an unsurpassed organizational effort, the Federal IT Agency (BIT) and the 16 states agreed on a common operation scheme. Stand-in and fall-back scenarios are solved through bi- and multilateral agreements between the providers, creating further efficiency through joint operations. Also, up-to-date data of the more than 5000 civil registration agencies was collected for the first time ever through a matching organizational effort by the ministries responsible for civil registration. The development phase which was done in form of rapid prototyping showed that such a large-scale system can be delivered fast and cheaply using SOA (only about 300 TEUR were spent in direct developments costs).

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Track record of sharing

The technical solutions as well as the management model of the DVDV are of high relevance for all attempts to develop and create Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)-based eGovernment infrastructures across Europe and in fact worldwide. By using open standards agreed upon by important standardization efforts such as WS-I and OASIS, the technology solution is a model which can be replicated – at little cost – by other national and state governments. That interest in a system as DVDV is high across Europe has been proven by the IDABC program’s middleware coordination activities. In this group, focusing primarily on secure messaging, an ad-hoc working group made up of representatives from Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany and Sweden was established to exchange experiences in building registries. At its first meeting in January 2007, the working group established that every member of it shared the same vision, problem statement and set of technical requirements; while differing only slightly in some lower-level implementation issues. This validates the decisions made behind the DVDV. Within Germany, the DVDV has successfully positioned itself as the single services-directory it needs to be in order to guarantee maximum efficiency. A competing attempt to create such a service-directory for the area of civil registration agencies by private software providers – which would not have included its competitors’ solutions – was abandoned in favour of use of the DVDV. Currently, all eGovernment services requiring a services directory intend to use the DVDV – as witnessed by the long list of applications to include their services into the DVDV. They include the Federal Register of “polizeiliche Führungszeugnisse” (certificates of good conduct) and services of the State Attorney’s Office of Brandenburg acceptance of legal briefs; Police Information System; State Pension System and Population Statistics, among others.

Lessons learnt

Lesson 1 - eGovernment decision makers responsible for high-level architecture might profit from the observation that by using an electronic directory service, savings in operational and implementation costs on existing infrastructures as well as direct and indirect reductions in administrative burdens can be effectively achieved. This evidence of high-impact, cost-saving eGovernment will help legitimize further investments, especially for professional, cross-organizational eGovernment initiatives. Lesson 2 - The DVDV shows to other public IT managers in Europe how cheap, fast and stable SOA technology can be used to deliver high availability, security and performance in practical cross-level E-Government applications. It is a cornerstone of a practically working Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in an open environment. Lesson 3 - Finally, the case illustrates to a general audience often sceptical of the “self re-organizing” capacities of the public sector that a cross-level, cross-sector co-operation of governments can really be achieved through the clever use of IT and innovative organisation models to go with it – reaping the benefits of eGovernment! As an additional benefit, all the mentioned lessons learned can be adapted by industry for their own delivery of complex SOAs.

Scope: Local (city or municipality), National, Regional (sub-national)