Municipal interoperability for OZG services and NOOTS

Although the Online Access Act (OZG) has provided the legal framework for years, many municipalities have yet to fully embrace digital administrative processes. The reasons for this vary. The most significant challenges and potential solutions are outlined below.

Several factors play a role here. For further consideration, the challenges can be divided into four categories:

To advance this development, municipal connectivity must be improved systematically. A single online form is insufficient for this purpose. What is needed is a robust interoperability model that can be transferred to different municipal IT landscapes. Interoperability establishes a link between digital administrative services and specialist processing. The necessary integration structures must be permanently operational. Only then will the OZG connection have an effect beyond individual pilot projects.

Experience from the implementation of the Online Access Act (OZG) shows where the practical benefits of digital administrative services lie. For a digital application to be fully integrated into processes, relevant data must arrive securely and with as few media breaks as possible during specialist processing. To achieve this, the participating systems must be connected to each other via suitable interfaces. The federal IT architecture and its standards provide important guidelines for this. Lessons have already been learned from this in register modernisation. The National Once-Only-Technical-System (NOOTS) provides the technical infrastructure for the exchange of evidence data, and the first productive data retrievals are already in operation.

However, establishing a connection to the relevant specialised procedures remains a practical challenge for municipalities. There are still implementation gaps in the practical application of these procedures, which make a comprehensive, repeatable connection to NOOTS difficult to achieve. These are difficult to close using individual, project-related connections. What is needed is a transferable operating model that supports interoperability even in heterogeneous municipal system landscapes and clearly defines responsibilities. Three points are particularly important for the municipal OZG connection:

The following example from North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) illustrates how this approach can be implemented. A data exchange platform was created to integrate EfA services into a heterogeneously grown IT landscape.The platform supports connections to federal standards such as OSCI/XTA 2 and FIT-Connect, enabling end-to-end data exchange in line with the Deutschland-Stack.

SEVEN PRINCIPLES is acting as an integration partner here, developing a component that supports municipal connection according to a repeatable pattern. This creates a common integration basis that can be transferred to other situations.

The quality of administrative digitisation also depends on the connection between online offerings and internal processing. Municipalities need an interoperable connection that fits their existing specialised procedures and is easy to operate. Interoperability allows digital administrative services to integrate with existing specialised procedures. This makes it possible to achieve digital availability in administration in practice.