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Closed doors: Ludwigshafen is fighting a major IT disruption!
Technical disruption at the Ludwigshafen city administration affects online services. Press conference on November 7th.
Closed doors: Ludwigshafen is fighting a major IT disruption!
The Ludwigshafen city administration is not having an easy time of it at the moment. A technical disruption that has been ongoing since November 6th has made both city websites and online services almost unavailable. As mrn-news.de reports, some administrative areas are also affected, which is causing dissatisfaction among citizens and employees.
Whether Mayor Jutta Steinruck and the head of IT services, Ralph Bauerschmidt, invite you to a press conference on the same day to explain the situation in more detail, the situation will probably not ease immediately. This will take place at 1 p.m. in the main fire station at Kaiserwörthdamm 1 and is intended to provide clarity about the background to the disruption and how to proceed.
A bureaucratic monster?
The problems in Ludwigshafen are not isolated. In Germany in general, the administration is struggling with the challenges of digitalization. Data from tagesschau.de show that the federal states are falling short of their own demands. The experiences of citizens who use a process such as vehicle registration, for example, are often characterized by waiting times and paperwork chaos.
An example that is mentioned again and again in the discussion is the situation in the Tauberbischofsheim tax office, where numbers from paper documents have to be laboriously entered into computers. Such circumstances make one doubt whether the digitalization of public administration can actually bring the desired relief in the near future.
A ray of hope for the future?
Nevertheless, there are also positive examples from other countries. India shows how it can be possible to process government processes almost entirely digitally. An app enables 1.2 billion people to resolve their concerns online. This could also be a model for Germany if digitalization finally reaches the necessary speed.
The Online Access Act of 2017 was actually intended to make trips to the office unnecessary. But here too the progress is disappointing. While only around 45-48% of administrative services are available online in Bavaria and Hamburg, similar developments are also stagnating in North Rhine-Westphalia, where software development should be the main focus.
The current technical disruption in Ludwigshafen is therefore not just a local problem, but reflects a widespread, systematic dilemma that many German cities and communities are struggling with. We can only hope that those responsible at the city administration will find a solution in the coming days!