On 5th October, the Better Regulation and Bureaucracy Reduction Network invited participants to its fourth annual conference in Tübingen under the title "Public Administration under Transformation Pressure". The conference addressed the question of how public administration can meet current challenges with its existing structures, staff and resources. Around 60 experts from politics and public administration presented recent projects and research results in four lecture slots.
Jana Stuck presented the results of the WIK study "IT services for municipalities: providers, competition and innovation". The study provides a market overview of 59 municipal IT service providers as well as 163 GovTech start-ups and analyses the providers' IT solutions and their cooperation with municipalities. While municipal IT service providers, as public companies, can be commissioned by their public owners without a tendering procedure (in-house procurement), public procurement procedures are a major obstacle for start-ups. Although municipalities are the most important target group for government technology start-ups, only a few municipalities have already contracted start-ups. Success stories, however, show the potential for innovation if municipalities use multiple sources for their digital transformation.
