Pictures of the Future    Spring 2006

Public Services on a Chip

Bits and bytes instead of mountains of files. The Siemens eGovernment Lab in Berlin reveals how the public services of the future will work.

The massive building located in Berlin may not look high-tech from the outside, but it offers a peak into the future of how governments will streamline their services. The building is the home of Siemens' eGovernment Laboratory, and it is where traditional administrative processes are being transformed from the world of filing cabinets and paper into the world of bits and bytes. "In our showroom we give people a glimpse into the digital administration of tomorrow," says Petra Winkler, head of technology at the lab. She explains that typical applications include an electronic funding form for processing unemployment benefits in the European Union and a Trust Center for digital signature cards.

eGov Lab has been a model for the Trust Center that Siemens recently set up for the German Pension Insurance Association, formerly known as the Federal Insurance Institution for Salaried Employees. The Association's multifunctional smartcards grant access to certain areas, record working hours, log employees onto computers and permit them to sign documents digitally in order to handle business processes completely electronically and therefore more efficiently and quickly. Approximately 30,000 cards were issued within the framework of this project.

eGov Lab's servers, which were set up in 2004 by Siemens Business Services, Siemens Communications and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, have at their disposal the operating systems normally available to government authorities. All of the eGovernment security software and applications are installed on them. In addition, there are PC workstations just like the ones that government employees work on. Because Siemens specializes in the integration of diverse components, the software and hardware come from a variety of companies, including Intel, Open Text, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun.

A project carried out at the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) clearly demonstrates how complex eGovernment can be. Siemens has digitized the agency's entire application procedure for political asylum. The objectives here were to develop an electronic filing system with a document management and workflow system, to connect 24 field offices with headquarters and to set up a secure communication infrastructure with several state and local authorities. It took five years, says Marc Niedenzu, head of Software Development at BAMF, for all 1,200 partial processes to be recreated and adapted electronically.

In 2005, BAMF employees created about 43,000 initial and follow-up applications based on the system developed by Siemens. "Some employees had reservations about the IT to begin with," Niedenzu reports. "But we were able to win them over, and today people really like using the system."

The BAMF project is now being presented to eGov Lab visitors as a prime example of the successful digitization of a government authority. "Our laboratory is a facility where Siemens can demonstrate its high level of expertise with eGovernment," explains Marketing Director Dr. Johannes Dotterweich. In addition, Petra Winkler's team uses the eGov Lab to try out new things—for example, when software is launched or a customer wishes to have a specific type of software. Then eGov technicians test these interactively with other components.

Take the case of the virtual mailroom. This is a complex program for authorities that—just like a real mailroom—accepts documents and forwards them to the right people. If digital documents are to be dispatched, the virtual mailroom checks their authenticity and integrity. Only then does it encode and sign the documents. "Before utilizing the virtual mailroom at the customer's office, we built a model solution here in the laboratory and tested it," Winkler says.

Siemens specialists are now developing solutions for electronic business between government authorities and industry, such as CO₂ emissions trading.

Interested visitors representing foreign countries are of course also welcome at the Berlin lab. And they like what they see. For example, the government of Macao has provided its citizens with smartcard-based ID cards from Siemens Business Services, and Italians and Britons now also have comparable citizens' cards.
                                                                                                                  Werner Pluta