Exploring the Applications, Data and Services Needed for a Cloud-Based Workplace for the Public Sector

Abstract

To ensure digital independency, the European program Gaia-X pursues the goal to provide the public sector a secure cloud with open source applications, data and services for a digital workplace [1].Which applications, data and services are needed and useful for a digital sovereign workplace for public employees? This paper presents the preliminary results of the Gaia-X POSSIBLE project and its contextual interviews with public administrative employees conducted in fall 2022, investigating their needs in regard to the Phoenix office suite by Dataport and the digital workplace beyond. Within the Gaia-X POSSIBLE project, according to our knowledge, for the first time public administration employees were involved in user research. To facilitate implementation of the study and within the given scope, in this first round, public administrative employees at state and municipality level in Schleswig-Holstein (Northern Germany) were targeted. These two target groups were supplemented by a third target group, namely students of Public Administration at the University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration and Services. We aimed at 5–20 participants per target group. In total, 32 contextual interviews were conducted. The contextual interviews were evaluated on the basis of a qualitative content analysis according to Mayring [11]. The 5 most essential office applications were e-mail, calendar, word processing, video conferencing and a shared document management system. In addition, an e-file application, telephony and PDF processing were rated as most useful, supplemented by notes, project management and other creativity and collaborative applications. For further studies, we suggest to extend the target group to other federal states, the federal government and other European countries. Quantitative analytics and/or surveys could provide reliable information on user numbers of office, specialist applications and data services. Also, usability studies focused on each single application would deliver more details.