The Interreg V project ‘Smart Government Academy’ (German title: ’Smart Government Akademie Bodensee’) connects international experiences and knowledge in order to respond to current opportunities and challenges in public administration. Nine cities and municipalities from Germany, Austria and Switzerland as well as four universities cooperate in four working packages. The University of Konstanz is lead partner of working package II 'Interdisciplinary digital competencies’, which examines new competencies in public administration to transform service delivery.
As part of the expiring New Public Management paradigm, public administrations have concentrated on their core competencies and outsourced IT competencies to external IT service providers. This leads to a digital competence gap: Services are designed from the internal - often legal - logic of public administration, but rarely with the needs of users in mind. As a result, the implementation and use of digital services in public administration lag far behind the citizens’ user experiences of private services. Therefore, public administrations need to build up new competencies based on the principles of human-centered design, agile leadership and agile work practices. By the implementation of these new working methods, we expect a cultural change resulting in the development of a digital mindset and the focus on the needs of internal and external users.