Practical and digital-ready leg­is­la­tion: what will be im­por­tant in the next legislative period

Never before has the call for a comprehensive modernization of the state been as loud as it is today. Proposals such as those from the Initiative for an effective state, the National Regulatory Control Council, Agora Digitale Transformation, and Allianz für den Staat von Morgen (all listed websites are German only) also identify legislation as a key area for action.

In the previous legislature, the German government set itself the goal of introducing a “Digitalcheck” for laws and gave the Regulatory Control Council an expanded mandate in this regard. Since 2022, DigitalService has been developing measures for digital-ready legislation on behalf of and in close cooperation with the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community (BMI) and in continuous exchange with the National Regulatory Control Council (NKR). We have already made significant progress here: Over 90% of new federal laws now use elements of Digitalcheck. We have provided advice (to varying de­grees) on over 70 pieces of legislation and, in 2024, trained 220 administration staff within just two months.

Given our experience to date, we know which next steps can significantly advance the new German government’s digitalization efforts with a view to achieving results-driven legislation that is digital-ready and suitable for the real world. After all, the foundations for practical implementation are already being laid in the legislative process. With good, effective laws as the basis, the state can appreciably simplify the day-to-day lives and operations of citizens, businesses, and administration staff, improve process efficiency, and reduce costs through focused efforts to cut red tape. This requires further de­vel­op­ment and comprehensive provision of measures designed to help legislative drafting di­vi­sions to produce legislation that is digital-ready and suitable for practical im­ple­men­ta­tion as well as interdepartmental structural change. These are clear takeaways from the anal­y­sis we have conducted.

In the first two years following the German government’s introduction of Digitalcheck (Ger­man only), we developed measures specifically designed to strengthen the capacity to draft legislation that is both digital-ready and feasible in practice. These include our sup­port hotline for quick digital feasibility queries, advice on technical matters, and train­ing on creating process visualizations.

In 2024, we conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis to evaluate the ef­fec­tive­ness of the Digitalcheck measures. Our goal was to examine how the measures have impacted administration staff: To what extent do they facilitate the drafting of digital-ready legislation in daily work? What are the barriers to their use? How are the Digitalcheck instruments procedurally mainstreamed? What other support measures are staff looking for?

To start with, we held 22 structured interviews with administration staff, representatives of implementing authorities, and NKR secretariat staff. Each of these lasted around 60 minutes. In addition, a total of 131 participants completed a quantitative online ques­tion­naire in October and November 2024.

Our analysis yielded three key takeaways:

1. Personal support from interdisciplinary experts is especially helpful. The objective per­spec­tive provided by digital experts also plays a key role in creating legislation that is practical and suitable for digital implementation.
2. Visualization, the inclusion of stakeholders involved in implementation, and the five principles for digital-ready legislation contribute significantly to ensuring the digital readiness of regulations. However, our analysis also showed that suitable instructional resources (e.g. training) and practical examples are needed to effectively use these methods and that there is strong demand for both.
3. The Digitalcheck methods are meant to support the drafting process from the outset, but this is not yet the case. At this moment in time, most respondents are using Digitalcheck as a final checklist, which seriously limits its effectiveness.

As the first step in the development of Digitalcheck, we worked together with BMI and an inter-ministerial working group in 2022 to develop five principles for digital-ready leg­is­la­tion. It quickly became clear that leg­is­lative drafting divisions need support to implement the principles in regulatory texts. Since then we have gradually expanded the measures offered to include personal advice and assistance.

The extent of the support is flexible, ranging from quick help via a free hotline and joint development of visualizations (e.g. implementation processes or regulatory decision trees) through to weeks of assistance during the drafting process, including low-thresh­old participation formats. All support measures are listed on the Digitalcheck website (German only).

Administration staff who use the measures find the personal support from in­ter­dis­ci­plinary experts (e.g. in the areas of service design, software development, data science, or process/product management) particularly useful. The relevance of the measures is reflected in the satisfaction rating of 4.7 on a scale of 1 to 5 and equally high rating for everyday suitability. A recommendation rate of 10 (scale of 1 to 10) also confirms the broad acceptance and recognition. The interdisciplinary perspective is a central factor: administration staff say they find the external digital and tech expertise especially useful. 79% of respondents view additional IT and digital expertise as crucial to more effective development of digital-ready legislation. However, one challenge is limited awareness within ministries of many of the measures, which prevents them from being widely used.

The Digitalcheck methods strengthen the capacity to draft digital-ready legislation. This is covered in more detail in the blog post “How practical and digitally implementable laws are developed.”

Visualization is a valuable tool for revealing opportunities for digitalization, presenting complex matters in an understandable way, and facilitating exchange with implementing authorities. These benefits are recognized by administration staff, implementing au­thor­i­ties, and managers alike. However, visualization is far from a standard approach when legislation is being drafted.

Suitable tools and templates are essential to making visualization a core element of legislative drafting processes. Targeted instructional resources and practical examples are also needed to facilitate its use by administration staff and to overcome potential barriers. We provide examples of visualizations developed in legislative processes as a guide on our website erarbeiten.digitalcheck.bund.de (German only).

The need for training is still high: 65% of the administration staff who responded would like specific training on preparing visualizations. The demand for training was also evident last year, when the Digitalcheck team offered sessions on visualization and principles for digital-ready legislation. In a very short space of time, 220 employees registered for the non-mandatory online formats. 65% found the training helpful or very helpful. 85% of participants would recommend the training to others.

The Digitalcheck methods are especially effective when already used in the early conceptual phase of the drafting process – before any text is written. For more on this, see the blog post “How practical and digitally implementable laws are developed.”

However, our analysis shows that 95% of respondents only work through the Digitalcheck documentation once the drafting phase is finished. Digitalcheck is there­fore primarily seen as a control instrument rather than a tool that can help to guide development.

The perceived role of Digitalcheck as merely documentation to be completed at the end and the lack of awareness of the other support measures limit its effectiveness. The biggest obstacles to using Digitalcheck at an early stage are: lack of examples and temp­lates (46%), lack of integration into existing processes (40%), insufficient un­der­stan­ding of the five principles (35%), and learning about Digitalcheck late on in the process (32%).

We have already created a solution to meet the need for practical examples: Ad­min­is­tra­tion staff can find legislative texts that effectively implement the principles of digital-ready legislation at beispiele.digitalcheck.bund.de (German only). These are intended as a guide and inspiration for administration staff developing future-proof regulations and are added to on an ongoing basis.

Our in-depth work on digital-ready legislation has allowed us to continuously analyze and, in some cases, closely support further initiatives for improved lawmaking such as Praxischeck, Bürgercheck, and the Center for Legislative Drafting (Zentrum für Legistik). While these are useful approaches, the lack of coordination between them often leads in practice to confusion among administration staff, which then limits their effectiveness.

Moreover, the potential of instruments such as Bürgercheck and Digitalcheck can only be fully exploited if they are integrated into the drafting process at the outset and are seen as methodological process support in the early design phase. When Digitalcheck is in­stead viewed as a checklist, this ensures that the instruments are generally con­sid­ered only at the end and are deemed an additional, bureaucratic burden. The true benefits of the various Digitalcheck measures are then not realized. This is confirmed by the findings of our analysis, but administration staff also report that the more than 40 different checks are almost impossible to keep track of and are rarely applied consistently in the busy workday.

What is needed is a coherent approach in the early design stage that ensures the intended impact of the checks (digital readiness, suitability for practical im­ple­men­ta­tion, citizen-centricity, etc.) is achieved – without increasing the amount of red tape.

We know from our experiences and impact assessments of recent years that our mea­sures are effective. Visualizations such as process workflows and decision trees, the strategic inclusion of stakeholders involved in implementation and the people affected, and interdisciplinary support – especially in the form of IT and service design expertise, which is seldom found in administrations – help to make legislation digital-ready and suitable for practical implementation.

However, it is not enough to take existing initiatives for improved lawmaking and simply develop these further – the underlying structures also have to change. The new leg­isla­tive period creates an opportunity to improve the structural frameworks for developing regulatory projects in a focused manner. This is the only way to leverage legislation to re­duce bureaucracy and digitalize public administration.

A central service unit for legislation should be established to broadly mainstream these measures. This would help federal ministries to develop regulatory projects. It would also take existing instruments and aids and develop them further as well as bundle training offerings and provide these broadly. Countries like the Netherlands and the UK have al­ready seen positive results with similar approaches. Particularly with high-priority policy matters and in crisis situations, interdisciplinary teams could quickly support federal min­istries and bring their implementation competence to bear. This would help to over­come obstacles more swiftly and facilitate the development of a modern, efficient public administration. These are clear takeaways from our experience and analysis.

Further information on the analysis and methodology used is available on GitHub (German only).