Podcast: The OZG cloud for municipalities – features and benefits

Last Updated on 1. April 2025 by mgm-marketing

In conversation: Marco Lawrenz, Principal Consultant and Scrum Master, and Christian Thomsen, Product Owner
Moderation: Stella Meyer, Consultant
Length: 24 minutes

Now also available to listen to on Spotify!

Transcription

Stella Meyer: Welcome to a new episode of Innovation Implemented, the mgm podcast on topics of digital transformation. A brief introduction to me: my name is Stella Meyer, I work as a consultant in the field of public administration and, more specifically, in the OZG cloud project, which I will be discussing today with my colleagues Christian Thomsen and Marco Lawrenz. Before we get into the subject, could you both please introduce yourselves very briefly? Christian, maybe you would like to start.

Christian Thomsen: I’d be happy to. I am the product owner of the OZG cloud, actually come from the technical field, but now that the project is growing, I have also taken on the strategic driving role to some extent.

Marco Lawrenz: My name is Marco Lawrenz. I am a Principal Consultant at mgm, currently holding the role of Scrum Master in the OZG-Cloud project, with which I control and support the development team. Christian and Stella in all the strategic questions in presentations, trade fairs, congresses. We form a kind of management team, I would say, for the entire project.

Stella: Very nice. Thank you both. For the sake of explanation, I will now take on the role of a case worker in a municipality and ask you the questions, which you can then answer very well. Let’s get started right away. Project OZG-Cloud.

How did it all come about? It’s been around for a while. Christian, maybe you’d like to start.

Christian: Gladly. So it all started with the Online Access Act, which was passed in 2017. This law states that by 31 December 2022, i.e. five years later, all government agencies must also offer the essential services, i.e. 99 per cent of the services they offer, digitally. As we all know in the meantime, this has not been fully implemented, in fact it has not been implemented at all. But that doesn’t mean that we didn’t start 2020 in good spirits. That’s when the municipalities in Schleswig-Holstein discovered that not much had happened in the three years since the law was passed. So they approached the ITVSH, which is an association for the support of digitisation in the municipal sector, so exactly the right point of contact. The municipalities went to them and said, what are you doing for us? They in turn approached us, mgm, and so it didn’t happen that I was able to talk to the municipalities and ask first what was needed from the municipalities’ point of view. They then said, well, we actually have online forms in different technologies, which we want to continue to use.

We need the option of a so-called application backend, i.e. the point at which the applications are received and can be processed to a rudimentary extent. And the bidirectional communication channel is very important here, and in a legally secure way. As we all know, e-mail is definitely not legally secure. There are the so-called citizen mailboxes and these should be connected to this application backend. And if you’re going to do it, then please do it in such a way that there’s no cap on 31 December 2022. We expect to be taking the whole thing much further, so please build a solution that is future-proof and can also map the next stages of the Online Access Act, which has been passed in the meantime. The solution we came up with is the so-called general application. This is the aforementioned application backend and it runs in a cloud that we have also built.

Stella: Now you have already gone into the components of the OZG cloud a bit. Can you maybe briefly outline again what else the OZG cloud includes and what I can actually do with it?

Marco: I’d be happy to. I think I can take over and just talk about how the OZG cloud actually presents itself to a case worker. The case worker currently receives online applications from many different sources. Online applications for a wide range of matters. There are applications for the dog tax, there are applications for a business licence registration.

We are familiar with all these services from the citizens’ offices, which every citizen has to visit from time to time to submit their applications. Now it so happens that the OZG cloud basically represents a workstation for a case worker, with which you can receive all these applications and forward them to the respective departments or systems that are used to create the notifications. This means that we have created a central input channel for each municipal case worker, where the online applications come in and the case workers there then have the option of processing the applications, issuing notifications and, above all, tracking the status of the individual applications.

Stella: That means that, as a case worker, I no longer have to write notes and so on. I have all of that in a general case-related procedure or in AlFa in the OZG cloud.

Marco: Exactly, that’s how the OZG cloud presents itself to you as a case worker. A front end for each case worker, where the incoming applications are listed and then distributed to the respective departments or can be processed. What we have built can be understood as an open system, since each of the different applications is also backed by different specialised procedures, and these specialised procedures are processed and decided either by means of case processing or by means of further so-called specialised procedure applications. These specialised procedure applications can be seamlessly connected to the OZG cloud, to the AlFa system, where the further processing of these applications is carried out.

In addition, as Christian mentioned earlier, the OZG cloud offers a legally secure messaging mailbox for communication between case workers and citizens. And of course, this is also a very important channel that case workers can use to ask citizens questions, and citizens can use to submit further documents relating to their application.

Stella: Very nice. That means that the processing is done completely in AlFa. I can communicate with the applicant via a legally secure mailbox. What happens when I have approved the application? I can also send the decision.

What about an e-file or a document management system? How far is the OZG cloud in this respect?

Marco: We have, of course, thought about this as well, because the OZG cloud should be seen as a kind of technical middleware to which various systems can be connected. I’ve already mentioned the specialised procedure systems, and of course we also provide interfaces for document management systems, where the applications described can then be stored or further processed, so that other systems, such as document management systems or specialised procedures, can be connected behind the reception and the communication between the case worker and the citizen, and then stored and further processed there according to the specifications.

Stella: We have already talked quite a bit about AlFa and the OZG cloud. Could we perhaps break it down a bit more, what the difference is, or take a closer look at the infrastructure? Christian, maybe a few more words from a technical point of view.

Christian: Yes, when you look at it from the outside, it is sometimes a bit confusing, sometimes even for the people who work with it. So the project is called OZG-Cloud. And the OZG-Cloud project consists of the OZG-Cloud and the general specialist application (AlFa). And the OZG cloud is the infrastructure component, i.e. the cloud system. And the general specialist application is a programme that we have regularly programmed and developed. The more interesting part is actually the cloud system, because this cloud system as an infrastructure component, as a basis, gives the whole thing a very large dynamic, especially when it comes to rolling things out across the municipal spectrum.

This is something that can be described as the holy grail of digitisation in Germany. Because, well, cities like Munich or Hamburg have the resources. Smaller municipalities don’t have that and that’s why it’s important that this is taken over for them. And we have just done this on the basis of a cloud system and this cloud system is highly automated. So we have written scripts that you can just let run. If we have enough storage somewhere, a complete cloud is set up as it were. If we want to set up a new municipality, we just enter two or three details, press the button and the whole thing is automated so that a few minutes later this entire area, this new instance, is provided for a municipality in an automated way.

And since we did all this on the basis of scripts, we also speak of infrastructure as code. So the entire infrastructure is hidden in a script code that I can run everywhere. And that means that I can then set up the OZG cloud in many different places, for example for each federal state. The federal states very often insist on having sovereignty over these applications and over these entire systems themselves. This ensures that this is the case and, to introduce another keyword, also covers the German administrative cloud strategy.

The most important thing in this whole story is this high level of automation and scalability. So, for our system, it is almost irrelevant in terms of maintenance and servicing whether I have 10, 50 or 1000 municipalities. They are all managed in the same way. And that is precisely what characterises a cloud, in addition to scalability. That means that I can not only do it for 1,500 municipalities, but if I suddenly have a few municipalities that need a lot more resources because they are larger cities and have many more applications, then the cloud, the cloud system that runs in the background, can handle all of this automatically.

That’s the second big advantage of the cloud. That’s why this technology was developed in the 90s in the first place and we’re using it today. And with this high level of automation, we can solve exactly this problem of having many small customers or municipalities for whom we can then do it with these scripts. And they then have to take care of very little themselves.

Stella: And what about the cloud? So I run AlFa as an application on it. But if I would like to have another software in there, is that possible in the cloud?

Christian: That would theoretically work if this software is prepared accordingly, i.e. containerised. If the software meets the requirements for running in the cloud, then we can also include it in the scripts and everything on our side. And you can also roll out this software at the push of a button.

Marco: And that is exactly what makes the OZG cloud so innovative compared to other OZG solutions that exist in the country. This really needs to be emphasised again briefly, because the municipalities receive a customisable cloud space with its own name on a large cloud system, which is, however, basically operated centrally by the state data centre. And they have the option of using the general specialist procedure on the one hand, but on the other hand, of running their individual specialist procedures on this cloud space. Christian already mentioned it just now. And this means that there is the possibility that all the operating costs that normally arise for these specialist procedures in the municipalities and that cause the municipalities grey hair, resources and actually almost to the point of being unable to work.

These can now be outsourced to the state data centres, which will then take over the operation of these specialist procedures for you. And that means you save an incredible amount of time and effort in administering your own specialist procedures, you can outsource it, you can get back to your core business or take care of the development of further administrative processes, which should actually also be the task of the municipalities.

Stella: That all sounds great. But if I, as a municipality, decide to implement the OZG cloud, what exactly do I have to do? Who do I need to contact? How does this implementation process work? Does it exist?

Will we be guided as a municipality? Who would I need to contact?

Marco: Basically, yes, you will be taken by the hand as a municipality. The OZG cloud product is a product that a federal state procures for itself. A state with the prospect of providing its municipalities with this general specialist procedure as well as with the respective clouds for the municipalities. This means that a federal state acquires this system by providing funds from the OZG budget, for example, and then has us at mgm install it in the respective state data centre. And what we have created are standard processes for the rollout, i.e. for making the individual cloud areas available to the municipalities.

On the one hand, the municipalities receive their own namespace, which they can use to be addressed and through which the application forms are created. They get their own cloud area. The case workers receive an introduction to the entire system and there is also a development committee with which we collect feedback from the case workers and the respective users, then also to incorporate continuous improvements into the system, so that at the end of the day a one-size-fits-all, an all-round carefree package is available, with which the municipalities get a tool that really makes their work easier in the end and they can actually hand over administrative work, introductory work, rollout and so on to the state and mgm in this case.

Stella: And the carefree package, I like that very much. Marco, you had just mentioned the word further development. Christian, another question for you: how is the OZG cloud developing?

Christian: Well, we are developing in various areas. Of course, the infrastructure component, the cloud, is being further developed, but the main efforts are, of course, going into the general technical process and the systems connected to it, in other words, the further development of the product, the programme. You said earlier that we have a connection to the DMS systems. The OZG cloud is not an archiving system. There are archiving systems that we access and connect.

And for that, we then also have to prepare the format and the data format accordingly and implement the pipeline through which this is done. We are currently working on this, it is one of our main objectives. Then we have created an interface for creating notifications. So I send an application there, application data there and get a notification in the form of a PDF back. We currently do this with a specific software, Smart Documents.

But theoretically, this can be done with any other software that has these functions. Namely, I send you data and I get a response and a document back. The creation of the response is being further expanded and should become even more convenient. There is a processor interface, which you can imagine like this: I send data to an external system, which examines the data, does something with it and sends me a response.

This is something like the entry point to our automatic processing. And this creation of responses and the processor interface are, so to speak, the little sisters of the big sister and that is the specialist process interface. This means that we are working on the general exchange of data between our general specialist processes and any other specialist processes. In other words, these specialist procedures should be able to access the functions of the OZG cloud and use them to control processes with us and generally use what we have. In addition, there is what we call the application space and the collaboration functions.

After all, authorities should also be networked with each other, or the case worker from the authority and the applicant want to exchange information, or, in the case of the applicant, for example, if it is a company, then there is also a lawyer who wants to be there, and so that they can exchange information with each other easily, there is the application room, which we have already built and now just needs to be connected. And what is also on the programme, but not until the second half of 2024, is the connection of registers for the processing of data. So that, for example, if I’m a case worker and I have an application here and I need to know whether the person is even registered in the corresponding district, then I just want to have that at the push of a button. And then the corresponding registry office is asked and the answer comes. That’s what we plan to do in the second half of 2024.

Stella: That’s a lot. It sounds like a lot of work, but it sounds like the OZG cloud will then include a great deal, from collaborative work to a normal, legally secure mailbox, etc. You’ve just listed everything. If I decide in favour of it now, then there is still a bit of a lack of the operating component. We haven’t really talked about it yet: what do I have to do, how does the operation work and how does the support work?

Christian: As a municipality, I am only responsible for maintaining my users and otherwise the state takes over the operation. If someone who is from the state is listening and would like to know how the operation works, they can turn to us with confidence. The municipality itself shouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Stella: It couldn’t be better. And what about support?

Marco: It’s actually similar for support. The state provides a support unit and can also, for example, set the support into their standard procedures if they wish. We have a very short line to this first-level support, which then also makes requests directly to us via the state, so that assistance, corrections and so on can be incorporated into our development roadmap very quickly and support requests can then also be served there.

Stella: That all sounds really interesting. Now, of course, I would like to ask one last question: who is actually already involved? Who is using the OZG cloud in Germany? I think Christian mentioned Schleswig-Holstein at the beginning. Marco, perhaps you would like to add something.

Marco: It should be clearly added that we are currently setting up a very promising pilot project with Bavaria and that Bavaria has decided to most likely introduce the OZG cloud next year. At the moment, everything is looking very positive. Other federal states are also knocking on our door. We are in talks with Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. And Christian and I are always keen to communicate the advantages of the OZG cloud at all the congresses and events, because we simply believe that we can really offer a solution for the federal states and the municipalities with which we can bring the ultimate advantage into the municipalities in the long term. And that’s why there’s also a very high demand in our direction, which actually really has to be met in the next few months and years.

Stella: Does that mean that we are expanding within Germany?

Marco: Yes, that’s the plan. Exactly.

Stella: Okay. Does that mean that Schleswig-Holstein and Bavaria are already working together? If necessary, other federal states will be added. How does the cooperation work there, actually?

Marco: We hope that the collaboration will be regulated in the future by a process that we are currently developing with these two federal states and developing to such an extent that it will also be possible for other federal states to join this alliance, namely the OZG-Cloud Alliance, which defines a collaboration model that is used to democratically develop voting rights, financing, further development interests and the entire productisation. And we then also set up a kind of regulation there, in which form influence can be exerted, so that no uncontrolled growth arises over the individual interests of the individual federal states and we thereby, I believe, arrive at a very good collaborative model for long-term product development.

Stella: Okay, that’s it. Thank you very much Marco and thank you very much Christian and thank you very much to all our listeners. We will link further information about the OCG Cloud and our solutions for public administration in the show notes. Bye and see you soon.