Guest article ZenDiS: Digital solutions from the administration for the administration

"We work in groups of 70 people every day on legal texts and send them in circulation via email because we can't work in one document at the same time." This, or something similar, is how a conversation with an administrative unit began a few days ago.

I hear and experience such examples from colleagues in municipal offices, state and federal ministries all the time. Public administration quickly reaches its limits when it comes to its own requirements for secure, confident and efficient collaboration between employees. We at the Centre for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS) were also confronted with this phenomenon: How can we work together as a team in a time-efficient manner, regardless of location and in compliance with current security standards?

In this situation, the ministries and offices are reliant on their personal creativity. For example, people meet in person at a table to work together on a printed text or find solutions outside the in-house IT system. At ZenDiS, we have the luxury that it is our job to build solutions for these problems. If we are successful, we are not the only ones who can organise our day-to-day work according to the latest standards. Our solutions will then also be available to our colleagues at local, state and federal level.

openDesk - a self-experiment

If you know a problem not only from the description of others, but from your own experience, it is often easier to find a solution. Who hasn't had to draw up long lists of requirements for tenders? They may be detailed, but they rarely really meet the requirements.

At ZenDiS, we consciously focus on incorporating practical experience into our solutions. With full vigour and growing team strength, we are currently bringing our flagship product openDesk to a market-ready state. What once began under the title "the superior workplace" has now developed into a genuine office and collaboration suite that can do much more than "just" word processing or spreadsheets.

To this end, we quickly introduced openDesk as a collaboration tool in our own team - knowing full well that it still needs to mature. What was initially a change for most of us (we are all used to the standard programmes from large commercial providers) is now an integral part of our everyday work. Every day, we report feedback in our team chat to make the user experience even better.

In addition to in-house use, the testing of openDesk by potential users from other administrative organisations is a very valuable source of feedback and ideas. We have already given over thirty public organisations access to our test environment for this purpose, including the Federal Ministry of Health, FITKO, the State of Berlin and the Swiss Federal Administration.

Our most important realisation: each authority uses the solution in its own way. While for some, openDesk is more of a tool for encrypted real-time communication, other authorities use it to build a forum for knowledge exchange, work in international teams on research issues or organise the controlling of complex projects and budgets directly in the programme.

From the administration for the administration

With the decision of the IT Planning Council, the federal and state governments have deliberately created ZenDiS in Germany as a competence and service centre that can generate and offer digital solutions from the administration for the administration that actually meet their needs. The products developed by ZenDiS are therefore not only customised, they are also competitive with large providers. The use of the applications offers public administration an increase in its own resilience in a digital world that is becoming more complex every day.

To ensure that the focus is on the solution and not the operation, openDesk will be available as a low-threshold software-as-a-service offering, among other things. Alternatively, decentralised service provider concepts enable operation in your own data centre.