The highest level of digitisation stays a distant dream for most German authorities.
In the current study “Digitising public administration 2026”, the authors find: only 14% of authorities in Germany reach maturity level 4 for their online services — the gold standard of digital government. In other words: only every seventh authority delivers genuine end-to-end digital government. But what do these levels actually mean, and who defined them?
These maturity levels originate in the federal government’s Online Access Act (OZG). That’s where it was defined how different degrees of digitisation differ from one another. And that matters, in order to be able to measure the successes (and failures) of digitising government in Germany. Here’s how the levels differ:
Level 0: Informational: citizens find information about authority services online — but nothing more.
Level 1: Interactive: the PDF form can be downloaded online, but has to be printed out, filled in by hand, and sent by post.
Level 2: Communicative: the application is filled out and submitted digitally via the web portal, but leaves the digital world as a printout once it reaches the authority.
Level 3: Transactional: application, identification and payment all run completely digitally, but separate work steps are still needed internally at the office.
Level 4: Fully digital (end-to-end): from data entry through automated processing to the digital decision notice, the process runs seamlessly with no media breaks.
So there’s still a lot to do. But fortunately there’s also progress, as we keep showing here. And there’s actually a fifth level too, one the government couldn’t even imagine back then: automated administration, where citizens don’t have to do anything at all any more, because everything happens by itself.
Data source: Study “Digitisation in public administration 2026” (CIO / COMPUTERWOCHE) https://rb.gy/mmaraf
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