Biography:
Dirk Thater is a partner at CPC AG, focusing on business transformation, programme and project management as well as change management. Before moving into consulting he gained 13 years of leadership experience in a mobility group and has worked with complex stakeholder and committee structures ever since. He was also a long-standing board member of the German ACMP chapter and actively shapes the change management community.
The Harz district plans to set standards in the future topic of 'digitalization'. It is about the people in the Harz and about companies, which are to be offered modern and future-proof location conditions. For this reason, CPC was commissioned to carry out a study that is at once a stocktaking, a concept and a starting point for implementing digitalization in the Harz district. Together with the district administration, companies, the university and educational institutions, concrete measures and solutions were developed that are now in the process of being realized.
OZG as trigger
The present study is the result of the interplay of politics, public administration and business. The Harz AG, as an institution of companies, made the investment possible. It wants to make its contribution so that the Harz district takes a leading role in Saxony-Anhalt. In doing so, the administration – the district office – was placed at the centre of the investigation. Public administrations are not regarded as pioneers when it comes to digitalization. The Online Access Act therefore obliges the federal government, the states and the municipalities to offer their administrative services digitally via administrative portals by the end of 2022. The Harz district regards the OZG as a trigger to create a modern administration that uses digitalization to become more effective, more efficient and, above all, more citizen-friendly.
Even though studies, by their very nature, are at first nothing more than a stack of paper printed on in real or virtual form, the focus of our joint investigations and analyses lay, and lies, from the outset on realizing solutions, true to the motto: "There is nothing good – unless you do it." For these reasons, we already involved the acting people during the study, in order to make the transition into the implementation phase seamless. As a change management consultancy that pursues hands-on project and change management, we were pleased to find this attitude in all those involved and to be able to advance it in the spirit of our corporate philosophy.
The new district administrator of the Harz district, Thomas Balcerowski, took up the initiative in order to advance his target picture of a modern administration and to bring the district into a pioneering role in the near future. The study reveals a number of fields of action, from which seven lighthouse projects were derived that now need to be implemented.
