Together on our way to the digital state
The plan is for the federal and state governments to draw up a federal modernisation agenda by December. How cooperation on digitalisation can succeed was the topic of the federal-state panel.
Experts from the federal and state governments discuss how cooperation on digitalisation can succeed at the SCCON 2025 federal-state panel. Image: Messe Berlin
When the new Federal Minister for Digital and State Modernisation, Dr Karsten Wildberger, announced that he was looking for federal states to participate in pilot projects for administrative digitalisation, he immediately received 16 responses, reports Prof. Dr Luise Hölscher, State Secretary at the BMDS. All were interested, two were selected – just for the start, as Hölscher emphasised: ‘It will get underway, and every federal state will get its project in the near future.’ But 16 pilot projects would have been too much for the new ministry.
Best practice in two pilot projects
Rhineland-Palatinate and Brandenburg were selected. In her opinion, the aim is ‘to show each other best practices,’ but also to report on what has not worked well, said Dörte Schall, Minister for Labour, Social Affairs, Transformation and Digitalisation of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, at the federal-state panel of the SCCON. Her federal state, for example, had decided to offer digital solutions to local authorities as a full service according to the Efa principle (one for all).
‘The days when federal states said, “I'll prove that we can do everything much better than the federal government and the other states,” are over,’ added Dr Benjamin Grimm, Minister of Justice and Digitalisation for the State of Brandenburg. For example, protecting against large-scale cyber attacks requires cooperation, for example in the form of joint data centres and joint cloud solutions. Or in terms of legal proceedings: ‘There are many specialist procedures that we lovingly maintain, but it is clear to everyone that this is not the future. We need a justice cloud, that's where we all want to go.’
Digital Ministerial Conference as a working basis
This panel makes it clear that the federal states have long since entered into a structured exchange on digitalisation issues, and the establishment of a federal ministry alone has had an ‘enormous impact on the issues,’ as Hölscher says. Dirk Schrödter, head of the Schleswig-Holstein State Chancellery, emphasised that it was ‘urgently necessary’ for the federal states to establish the Digital Ministerial Conference (DMK), where they can pool their state interests and discuss them with the federal government on an equal footing. The next major goal is the Federal Modernisation Agenda, which is intended to complement the federal government's ‘Modernisation Agenda for Germany’ presented on Wednesday.
Hölscher reported that 160 individual proposals from the federal states had been incorporated into the federal agenda. The Federal Ministry had grouped these into eleven clusters, which are now being worked out in working groups. The state chancelleries are to discuss the drafts in November, and the Federal Modernisation Agenda is to be adopted by the Conference of Minister Presidents in December.