What defines the sector
The public sector is not an industry in the classic sense — it's a federally interwoven network of the federal government, 16 states and around 11,000 municipalities, each with its own competencies, laws and IT estates. Standard architectures regularly collide with that variety.
The actors are federal and state agencies, municipal administrations and their IT service providers (AKDB, ekom21, KDO, Dataport, ITZBund and others), supported by shared building blocks like BUND ID, FIM, the OZG hub and sector-specific platforms such as XÖV or XPlanung. More than 6,000 different line-of-business applications are in use country-wide — from population registers through trade registers to property tax software.
Legal framework: OZG (Online Access Act, now under the OZG amendment / OZG 2.0), EGovG, BGG/BITV (accessibility), GDPR plus state data protection laws, eIDAS, KRITIS rules for particularly relevant administrations. Procurement runs through UfAB tender documents, EVB-IT contracts and procurement law (VgV/UVgO) — its own world with its own pace.
Federal
Federal ministries, subordinate agencies, ITZBund — IT consolidation with budget and patience.
States
16 states with their own administrative laws and IT strategies — no single standard.
Municipalities
~11,000 cities and towns, served by municipal IT providers — the operational front line of digitalisation.
Line-of-business systems
Over 6,000 applications with their own data models and lifecycles — rarely interchangeable.
Current challenges
German public administration's digitalisation has been in the headlines for years — and not without reason. Major construction sites run in parallel, each at its own pace.
OZG implementation. Around 575 administrative services are supposed to be available digitally country-wide. Progress varies sharply: some services are fully digital in some states and barely started in others. The OZG amendment readjusted in 2024 — bindingness, mobile-device fitness, evidence retrieval — but operational delivery remains the responsibility of states and municipalities.
BUND ID as a federal identity provider. Citizens should be able to authenticate to any agency with a single account. Integration uses SAML or OpenID Connect (more on our IAM page). eIDAS trust levels — low, substantial, high — decide which service is usable with which identity.
FIM methods and data standards. FIM (federal information management) models services, data fields and processes uniformly — a shared language that took years to develop and now needs to land in application journeys and line-of-business systems. XÖV standards for data exchange between authorities sit alongside.
Accessibility. BITV 2.0 demands WCAG 2.1 AA as a minimum for all publicly accessible web offerings. Keyboard navigability, screen reader compatibility, contrast, voice output — not a bolt-on but an architecture decision from day one.
Personnel shortages and long lifecycles. Case workers aren't IT pros — software has to be usable without forcing training. At the same time, public-sector systems live 10 to 20 years. New solutions have to be built for that horizon, not for one year.
Procurement. EVB-IT contracts, UfAB, procurement law — buying takes months, sometimes years. Software has to fit the tender description, be moulded into EVB-IT contract templates and survive the bid process.
Why custom software
Platform building blocks like BUND ID, the OZG hub and service accounts solve part of the federal complexity — but not the line-of-business application itself, not the municipal application process, not the idiosyncrasies of a state administration. Custom software begins exactly there.
Federal idiosyncrasies aren't decoration but a structural principle: every municipality has different internal processes, every state different legislation, every authority different data holdings. "One solution for all" works at the platform level — not at the line-of-business level. A building permit portal in an 8,000-resident municipality has different needs from one in a major city with its own building department.
Concrete examples of custom building blocks we build or have built:
- OZG application journeys: accessible, BUND-ID-capable, FIM-compliant, with a connection into the line-of-business system — modular, so a municipality can swap out blocks.
- Municipal citizen portals: a single entry point for every digital service, with My Account, case tracking, push notifications.
- AI agents for citizen telephony: CityAI as our productised answer — with MCP integration into line-of-business systems (see CityAI and Agentic Systems).
- Automated approval paths: a workflow engine using FIM-modelled processes, escalation to case workers when needed, full audit trail.
- Migration tooling: when switching the line-of-business application — data enrichment, mapping, validation.
Our position: we build the applications standard platforms don't cover — slim, documented, operable by municipal IT providers and tender-fit. The depth for OZG, FIM, BITV and EVB-IT is ours; administrative logic stays the customer's.
