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The corona pandemic gave Germany a boost in digitization, say some politicians.
But above all, it shows where the country is lagging behind.
The scientific advisory board of the Federal Ministry of Economics has now blatantly summarized the failures in an expert opinion.
The title: "Digitization in Germany - Lessons from the Corona Crisis"
"Germany has structures, processes and ways of thinking in public administration that sometimes seem archaic," quotes the Handelsblatt in advance from the report that will be published this Tuesday.
There are "various forms of organizational failure."
According to the experts, money is not the problem.
Rather, there is a lack of "a clearer allocation of competencies and responsibilities," it says in the report.
With the digital pact for schools, for example, only a fraction of the available federal funds have reached the schools so far.
The committee of experts advised by the Minister for Economic Affairs, Peter Altmaier, advocates a binding treaty between the federal states with clear guidelines for simplifying administrative processes.
The experts also do not accept the argument that Germany launched many digitization projects during the pandemic.
Much of what was implemented in a short time during the corona pandemic could have been done long before the crisis, "Handelsblatt" quotes the chairman of the scientific advisory board, the economist Klaus Schmidt.
And there has been little progress in the school and health systems.
The experts also warn against simply sitting out the pandemic and then returning to old patterns.
"The decisions made during the crisis, often of limited duration, in favor of making processes more flexible should be put to the test by politicians, but also by administrative and authority management in the coming months," says study co-author Dietmar Harhoff, director at the Munich Max- Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, quoted.
"There must be no automatic regression to the bureaucratic guidelines and procedures that were common before the crisis."
Basically, clear leadership is needed to convey the urgency of the digital transformation in ministries, schools or courts.
mmq
