Administration of the future

Public authorities of the future will have no need for waiting rooms and numbered tickets. They will be accessible around the clock via the Internet and central telephone numbers, offering fast, comprehensive service.

Deutsche Telekom is helping municipalities to develop state-of-the-art e-government structures.

As from March 2009, 13 million people in the German cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Oldenburg and in model regions in North Rhine-Westphalia and Hesse are now able to dial the central service number 115 with inquiries for public authorities. This makes it easier to find the appropriate point of contact for questions about parents’ child allowance or forms, ID cards or registry office appointments, for example. Deutsche Telekom is a partner in the pilot project, while T-Systems takes the calls from the respective networks and forwards them to regional call centers.

Here the call center agents can answer most questions directly with the aid of a knowledge base. If special knowledge is required, the caller is put through to the right point of contact at the public authority or receives a return call a short while later. The long-term plan is to integrate all the existing citizens’ service centers in Germany into the “D115” project. The municipalities themselves decide which modules from the T-Systems “D115 ready” system they use and which services they want to provide to their citizens in this way.

Online city hall in Majorca
In cooperation with T-Systems Spain, Palma de Mallorca launched its digital municipal government portal, the “Portal des Ayuntamente de Palma.” Using a mouse or a cell phone, residents can fill out registration cards and other documents, make payments or access information on more than 170 administrative processes. 80 percent of all municipal services should be available through the quadrilingual portal by 2010. It will then be possible to apply for construction permits and deal with tax matters through the portal. A central support hotline that is staffed around the clock completes the portal offering. In addition, a mobile office service visits districts of the city that do not have their own agency office. It accesses the municipal government network via a real-time link.

Networked parking ticket machines
There are other e-government solutions than citizens’ service centers. The municipal administration of Wiesbaden, in conjunction with T-Mobile, is taking a pioneering approach to monitoring its parking ticket machines, showing how versatile the use of communications technology can be. To save on unnecessary journeys to check the machines and reduce their downtime, their control systems have been connected to T-Mobile’s mobile communications network. Each of the 200-plus electronic parking ticket machines now sends a status message to the control center at regular intervals. Paper shortages, vandalism damage and other faults can now be dealt with more quickly.