With BundOnline, the Government Is Always Open

Government bureaucracy inevitably means a lot of waiting in line to get things done. The German government and CSC have found a way to get citizens out of line by getting them online instead.

BundOnline 2005 was born from ambitious plans: to Web-enable by 2005 any government service that could be offered online. "The data shall run, not the citizens," former German chancellor Gerhard Schro"der said while promoting the initiative. The CSC-coordinated program ultimately encompassed 440 services in 140 different federal authorities, and today is the largest e-government project in Europe.

One address for every need

The first goal of BundOnline was to give people a single Internet address for all of their federal government needs. That required a common platform to connect all of the Internet services. As the major vendor among multiple consulting companies, CSC coordinated the project, designed a standard technical architecture and handled risk management.

The government authorities required a diverse mix of services, including a geodata service that helps citizens find out if the location for their new house is suitable; the Archisafe project, which archives all federal documents digitally; and a service that lets businesses apply to export protected plants and animals. Even if a process used to require visits to multiple agencies, BundOnline ties the services together so that the user only needs to visit one site.

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One of CSC’s biggest challenges as project manager was working with more than a dozen government ministries. "Every agency is an isolated company responsible for its own technology. They’re not used to getting IT from above," says Boris Neutzler, one of the CSC consultants who coordinated the initiative. "We didn’t have the ability to say, ’You have to do this because we say so.’ We had to convince." CSC used expert teams called catalysts to coach the decentralized authorities through the projects.

As chief architect for the project, CSC helped design BundOnline to use basic components and standard interfaces for integration. BundOnline includes such technical features as a service-oriented architecture, standardized enterprise content management, secure transaction and communication standards, and digital signatures that protect the authenticity of electronic documents. These innovations helped Neutzler and fellow consultants Markus Schmitt, Wolf Zimmer and Ernst-Dieter Wallrodt win CSC’s Award for Technical Excellence. More importantly, they helped the 1.6 billion euro project finish ahead of schedule.

A government that’s always open

Unlike many IT projects, BundOnline took place under public scrutiny and with a highly visible deadline as the government touted the forthcoming program. "With this volume and public attention, it was very important to reach the finishing line on time," Neutzler says. "We reached it four months ahead of schedule."

After the project was publicly unveiled in September 2005, it quickly became a success. "E-government is no longer in its infancy in Germany. With its first-generation e-government-initiatives – ‘BundOnline 2005’ and ‘MEDIA@Komm’ [another e-government project] — public authorities have made some progress in tapping the potential of the Internet," a Deutsche Bank Research Institute study found. By moving that traffic to the Internet, the German government expects to save several hundred million euros per year.

BundOnline changes the way German citizens interact with their government. Someone who loses his job can now go online to a virtual marketplace that searches for openings in all cities. In the past, his only option would have been to wait at his local agency, which had listings for just one location. A single Web destination means that people spend less time bouncing among agencies to find the information. And the Web is never closed. "You can go whenever you want to go online, you don’t have to wait for office hours," Neutzler says.

Although the individual government services were built by different government contractors, as technical architect, CSC had to solve problems that applied to all of them. For example, some services require a secure digital signature that carries the same legal weight as a written signature. CSC worked on a system integration concept for the basic components like digital signatures, application forms and payment, which can be used by all application services.

Having such authentication built into BundOnline gives people quick access to their information. If citizens wanted to know what their retirement fund balance was, they used to have to send a letter to the appropriate authority and wait sometimes months for a response. Now they can go to the Internet and get an ID and a secure connection to their account in minutes.

The success of BundOnline 2005 has attracted the interest of several other European governments. CSC won a similar project in the German state of Hessen, and the German federal government has identified other services that can also be brought online. As a result, more people and companies needing government help will be standing in line less.