Knowledge Base

Public management has to react to changes in national and global contexts. A current key driver for changes can be seen in the Europeanisation, which affects the level of member states, caused by EU integration processes. Successful administrative action in the multilevel European system requires adjustments, ensuring efficient dealing with European objectives.

It is most important to take into account the state-specific circumstances, as well as local and regional specificities. For example, the German public administration differs fundamentally from public administration in other countries. Solutions that were identified as right and expedient for one country are not automatically useful in another. The possibilities of implementation will vary due to diverse traditions and organisational cultures.

Public sector organisations are mainly knowledge-intensive organisations, and to exploit their knowledge, effective knowledge sharing among the different departments is required. There can be great advantages if information is not only used in the own administration but is shared between hierarchies, different policy areas and levels of government. Including findings from other disciplines in respective monitoring systems (e.g. education, social, youth, and work) can create synergy and learning effects, which in turn leads to a share of benefits.

Public administration is a strictly standardised and structured environment, which makes it calculable and predictable to a certain extent. This includes, for example, a sufficient number of qualified employees. Also for the public administration employees in our focus group, this strict organisational framework seems to be important in order to complete their work and task. On the other hand, it would be desirable that this frame allows certain freedoms within it. This (limited) flexibility can be helpful in responding to unexpected developments.

A relevant but also critical factor in public management is the staff. It is important to recruit junior staff and specialists, which can manage the given challenges and have the necessary skills and technical knowledge to promote the digital transformation. Particularly in view of the demographic developments, it seems essential to recruit new staff and retain them in the long term.[1]

The head of the administration modernisation division on a regional level confirmed that one of the most important needs of public administration is cooperative working. Hierarchy is an important part in public administration but it also represents a limitation for its work. The more complex social problems become, the more complex are the governmental answers to them. Public administrations should be more open and flexible in the cooperation between different stakeholders, partners and hierarchy levels.

Public sector has to deliver services to citizens despite resource constraints and budgetary pressures. Because of this personnel and financial limitations, available resources must be used as cost saving and valuable as possible.

Standards require a certain legal basis and binding specifications. At the same time, they must be also accepted by the target group. If standards are enforced, they offer the advantage of planning and investment protection. This provides a good basis for further digitisation of processes.[1]

In 2001, the industry analyst Douglas Laney at Gartner described data management challenges along the three dimensions volumes, velocity and variety in the E-commerce branch. Volumes stands for the quite huge increase of volumes of data, Velocity for increased point-of-interaction speed and the pace of data generated by interactions and used to support interactions. Data Variety means variety of incompatible data formats, non-aligned data structures and inconsistent data semantics. This 3-V-model has been widely used attempting to define big data since this publication in 2001. [1]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a possibility to improve policy and decision making and can be understood as the automation of intelligent and human-like behaviour. The most important techniques to support specific cases of indeed high complex policy making processes are decision support and optimisation techniques, game theory, data and opinion mining, agent-based simulation and visual scenario based evaluations. [1]