[nisa]

Having worked in some projects related to German bureaucracy: It's not exactly correct from my experience but it's close - is usally works like this:

A fixed sum for digitization is allocated and the local government publicly advertises a project. Nobody knows how to write a good tender or the tender is written in such a way that only some specific companies can fullfil the request (I doubt the cousin thing is so common but I might be wrong here) but I saw how people writing the tender and the companies involved (mostly consulting companies or some small specific companies that lack quality) write that thing together.

Now the biggest problem: Often the lowest bidder has to win the tender by law - if you choose the good company often the lowest bidder takes you to court.

The lowest bidder delivers something late and broken and is allowed to get more money for fixing it - often so much money that there is an incentive to be broken by design - i.e. high maintenance costs / overly complicated architectures.

Everone is unhappy and it's of course not the failure of the broken tender or the shitty company - so there needs to be a follow up project that fixes the issues that again is won by the shitty company.

To see how expensive and crazy this gets: einmalzahlung200.de - a form where you could apply for 200€ for heating costs / covid assistance costs multiple million Euros - some consulatancies were involved. It couldn't handle the load but was celebrated to be next level because nothing had to be printed out.

It's not that Germany lacks talent or even companies that could deliver good quality but the process is broken.

Another problem is data protection law - this is a good thing in Germany but it's often used as an excuse in the bureaucracy and a weapon to fight progress.

For me it feels like the public administration was made to be helpless and the public money is stolen by consultancies and shitty companies.

[nicbou]

> Another problem is data protection law

I want to emphasise this for non-German readers. "Datenschutz!" has become a sort of one-word meme to explain why everything still runs on fax.

[mousetree]

My favourite, taking a photo of a nice outdoor scene with random people in the background, someone will always run up to you shouting "Datenschutz!"

[usrusr]

Harmless, in my experience. The gloves come off when there's not a person in the picture but a car.

[sib]

Say more?

[OoooooooO]

Doesn't matter because Panoramafreiheit.

[fbn79]

Same for Italy... just add more shit

[thinkindie]

not entirely true. Italian living in Germany, Germany approach to digitalisation is by far the worse. There are a lot of things that have been done better in Italy (e.g. the e-ID Card) and worst case scenario you can still send a PEC or an email to the PA because they must have it.

In Germany, you can sometimes write an email but they will ask you to sign a paper where you recognise that email is not a trustworthy medium compared to a random email delivered by the postperson in your mailbox (or not) without a receipt whatsoever. Oh, and fax machine is still a thing in Germany.