j&s-soft GmbH presented enmeshed at this year’s SAP Academic Community Conference DACH 2022, organized by the two SAP University Competence Centers from Magdeburg and Munich and the SAP Academic Board DACH, from September 12-13 in Magdeburg.
Under the motto “Enterprise Cloud”, the focus was on the improvement of complex, contemporary operational application systems and their effective control.
Participants included IT experts, interested researchers, users of digital services in academic teaching, and decision-makers from business, administration, and politics for a joint, supraregional dialog and exchange of experiences.
An active exchange of experiences took place in the community sessions on the second day of the conference. j&s-soft GmbH took over a part in the session ‘Digital Administration’. With its open source solution enmeshed, j&s-soft made a significant contribution to the BIRD pilot project within the framework of the National Education Platform and the Digital Networking Infrastructure for Education.
Rethinking administration digitally
Many projects for the digital transformation of administrative processes emphasize novel technologies or their adaptation from other application areas to classic tasks of public administration. In doing so, they neglect – in contrast to the private sector with workflow management or business process reengineering – in most cases the potential of a courageous rethinking of these processes under perception of changed expectations of the users of such digital services. In addition to the (partial) automation of value-adding and supporting processes, customer benefits and satisfaction increasingly became the focus of innovation projects.
However, numerous studies show that most digital transformation projects fail not because of complex technologies or sometimes challenging tasks, but because of people – on both sides of the digital performance (service provider and customer). Change management focuses not only on tasks and technology, but also on people. Equally, enabling people to think digitally or informatically, forming a digital mindset, is of particular importance in the transformation of administration.
Guiding questions of the session were:
- What do citizens expect from digital administrative services today?
- How can the efficiency of digital processes be measured?
- What level of convenience is affordable while maintaining privacy?
- How can risks of insufficient data security be minimized?
- Do digital services promote the participation of socially disadvantaged people or do they make it more difficult?
- Can citizens competently manage their data in a self-sovereign and decentralized manner?
- How is secure communication between digital service providers and citizens possible during a specialized procedure, as well as indefinitely afterwards if needed?
- Which digital competencies help citizens to deal with digital administrative services and which digital competencies are necessary for people who are employed in digital administration?
- What competencies are needed to make successful digitization decisions?
With the keynote speech “Mandatory and voluntary continuing education – how digitalization will make processes simpler and more secure”, we at j&s-soft wanted to initiate the discussion on how the very simplification of processes in registration, performance records and identification will change the educational landscape. Project example was enmeshed as part of admissions at a state university.
Conclusion of the session
In the discussions following the presentation by j&s-soft and after the other presentations in the session, it became clear that digital adaptations in administration must also take into account the human factor on the user and administration side. The prospects for more education through simplified access to it and better communication were rated by all participants as pleasing, desirable and feasible.
Photo: SAP /Andreas Lander