The Digital State: Germany’s Administration in the 21st Century

5 min Read Time

Germany has launched all 115 prioritized federal OZG services online. The BundID citizen account counts 6 million registered users. OZG 2.0 introduces binding deadlines for the first time: All administrative services for businesses must be digitized by 2028. Criticism remains loud – yet one year after its entry into force, little has changed for citizens. Beneath the surface, however, a foundational infrastructure is taking shape – one that will make Germany meaningfully more digital over the long term.

The Key Takeaways

“OZG 2.0 sets binding deadlines for the first time: All administrative services for businesses must be digitized by 2028.”

OZG 2.0: What’s Really Changing

The Online Access Act 2.0 entered into force on 24 July 2024 – after an initial failed vote in the Bundesrat and months of mediation between the federal government and the Länder over funding. Its changes relative to the original OZG are substantial.

First: The Once-Only principle is now legally anchored. Authorities must retrieve data from official registers instead of repeatedly asking citizens for birth certificates or other documents. This sounds trivial – but it demands a fundamental overhaul of Germany’s register infrastructure. The National Once-Only Technical System (NOOTS) is slated to be established via intergovernmental agreement. In parallel, 935 AI startups are accelerating public-sector digitization from the outside.

Second: Binding deadlines. OZG 1.0 contained no enforceable timelines – the result was the infamous “fax-based administration.” OZG 2.0 sets a firm deadline of 2028 for digitizing all administrative services for businesses. Whether this target will be met remains uncertain. But for the first time, there is a concrete date against which progress can be measured – and 1,307 Hidden Champions are waiting for bureaucratic processes to finally function digitally.

Third: Register modernization as the foundation. The Register Modernization Act creates the legal basis for cross-agency data exchange. Estonia has operated such a system for two decades using its X-Road infrastructure – and that very architecture is now being piloted in Germany. The Nortal AG, which built roughly 40 percent of Estonia’s e-government solutions, now advises the German Pension Insurance and chambers of commerce and industry on digitization. Estonian expertise is flowing directly into German administrative projects.

Who’s Digitizing Germany’s Administration?

Implementation hinges on concrete players – whose profiles differ fundamentally from conventional IT service providers.

Dataport is the shared IT service provider for northern German federal states and has operationally delivered the “One for All” (EfA) principle: standardized modules developed by one state and reused by others. Hamburg, Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony-Anhalt all rely on EfA. The Cloud Skills Offensive benefits directly from this standardization.

Nortal AG brings Estonian e-government expertise to Germany. With over 1,800 employees across 15 countries, Nortal built Estonia’s e-tax system, e-health solutions, and proactive social insurance services. In Germany, Nortal has been working since 2018 – out of Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden – on register modernization, electronic invoicing for federal and state governments, and municipal software solutions, including a city-wide system for housing homeless people in Berlin. Nortal ranks among Germany’s top 15 e-government consultancies and has been fully employee-owned since 2016.

govdigital coordinates federal collaboration as a cooperative: from the EfA marketplace, where Länder and municipalities can reuse digital administrative services, to the German Administrative Cloud and a shared AI ecosystem. The Federal Printing Office secures digital identity through its eID infrastructure – the essential prerequisite for both the BundID and the Once-Only principle.

Hamburg Shows How It’s Done

Hamburg leads the Länder ranking: 290 of 575 OZG services are live, with 52 new digital services added in 2024 alone. Vehicle registration, trade licensing, parental allowance – these aren’t pilot projects but production-grade services used daily.

Hamburg’s success has a clear root cause: the city committed early to Dataport. Rather than developing each service in-house, Hamburg deploys standardized EfA modules also used by other Länder. Bavaria leads among area-based federal states, rolling out 29 new services in 2024. Schleswig-Holstein likewise benefits from the Dataport infrastructure. At the opposite end of the spectrum sit Länder insisting on building every service themselves – and progressing accordingly slowly.

“Digital administration is not an IT project. It is a cultural transformation requiring political will, organizational change, and technological modernization – all at once.”
– Bitkom President Ralf Wintergerst, Digital Administration 2025

The Honest Balance Sheet

Since early 2025, only nine additional services have been fully digitized nationwide. That’s sobering. BundID awareness stands at just 20 percent. And many “online” services offer only a PDF download or a web form – not an end-to-end digital process chain. According to the 2025 Agency Digital Meter, only 196 of the 575 OZG services are available nationwide.

Yet the direction is right. The key players are in place: Dataport standardizes modules for northern Germany; Nortal injects Estonian e-government expertise; govdigital builds the federal cloud infrastructure. Register modernization is underway. BundID is scaling. The NOOTS framework is ready.

Germany won’t become Estonia – where 99 percent of administrative services are digital. Nor does it need to: Germany’s federal structure is more complex; data protection and security requirements under NIS2 are higher; institutional inertia is stronger. What matters is that the path forward is now irreversible – and companies like Siemens Energy and Nordex, winners of the energy transition, prove Germany can deliver transformation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading

• 2026 is the year of the comeback: Why Germany will pull off the turnaround – MyBusinessFuture
• Cloud Trends 2026: What IT decision-makers must watch now – cloudmagazin
• Cybersecurity Trends 2026: Seven developments – SecurityToday

Header Image Source: Pexels / Edmond Dantès