This was a busy week again.
After our slot moved a couple of times, I contributed to a panel on accessibility at the Zukunftskongress on Wednesday. With me on the panel were Erdmuthe Meyer zu Bexten from the State of Hesse and Klaus Werth from the Federal Ministry for Digitalisation and State Modernisation, formerly at the Federal Ministry for the Interior. Erdmuthe had already been a contributor to the Service Standard DIN specification process since last autumn. So, I was somewhat familiar with her work.
But I had not heard someone from the ministry talk so eloquently and passionately about accessibility, usability and iterative software development. It seems that Mr Werth had not had much contact with Digital Service before, but after our joint panel, he was interested in a more in-depth exchange. He and his team did feed into the Service Standard work in the background, though, I learnt. He is responsible for overseeing the consolidation of all internal IT services and providing accessibility guidance, which his team co-developed with the State of Hesse.
Celebrating a legal instrument for quality public services
We have a statutory instrument! What once seemed unimaginable has now received unanimous consensus from the 16 federal states and the federal government. That is a huge win for citizens who rely on high-quality public services for the state to work for them.
On Thursday, the 17 state secretaries agreed to make the Service Standard mandatory in their IT planning council meeting, just 1 day after its 5th birthday. So, this has come a very long way. There isn’t a better possible birthday present I can think of. For it to be delivered, a significant amount of ramp-up engagement work was required from hundreds of people. Political capital at the Federal ministry for digitalisation and state modernisation and elsewhere had to be spent to get this through. The decision operationalises the new government’s coalition commitment to make administration “accessible and user-friendly for everyone”. This is vital cause without legal instruments, vague policy directives don’t go anywhere.
We have a statutory instrument! Today, the German #ServiceStandard has been decided to become mandatory. The 16 CIOs of the federal states and the federal government agreed on it. 1 day after its 5th birthday, this is the best possible gift imaginable. Lots of heavy lifting to get here 😅
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 26, 2025 at 8:13 PM
[image or embed]
From 2028, we’ll see the launch of digital public services, which will need to be developed fully using a user-centred, iterative, data-driven approach. This is breaking new ground, and it requires new procurement rules, development frameworks, mindsets and skills across the public sector.
I would have wished for a tighter timeframe, but that would not have been realistic. The states and federal government will need time and space to inform, educate, and develop the capacity and capability to meet the new requirements. In the coming month, our Service Standard team will create comprehensive guidance for commissioning and development folks, review and assessment mechanisms, and investigate further support mechanisms.
The real and serious work is ahead of us. Some things come full circle for me: Back in November 2018, I co-developed a Service Standard for the city state of Hamburg with its Digital First team. It went nowhere. The first iteration of the national Service Standard 2020 also lacked teeth, and Digital Service was almost the only organisation in the entire German public sector to meet it. Things are different this time. Finally, we have senior support and a legal instrument to support the implementation of service quality standards.
Influencing policy to improve the service experience and outcomes for people has been on my mind for a very long time. “What policies have you changed so far?” was a question I asked in my original job interview at Government Digital Service with Lou Downe, Mark Hurrell, and Zara Farrar back in December 2015. It took me a while to help make a dent in that space.
I feel much gratitude and excitement. And I am hopeful for what’s next. We will need to bring the Service Standard to thousands of people across the country, as well as to 3 levels of government, to help make better services happen. It will be a massive collaborative effort. We better get to work.
On a much more concrete work level this week: I sparred on content and structure for the Service Standard page with content designer Linn and printed design artefacts with Bianca.
Meeting the EUDI Wallet’s Head of UX Design
We tried to arrange this multiple times already. On Monday, I finally met with Arne for lunch. For a bit over a year, he has been working as the Head of UX Design for the EU Digital Identity Wallet project at SPRIN-D. Our paths crossed over a decade ago, when he joined the Service Design Berlin meet-ups that I co-organised. So, there was a lot of catch-up necessary to understand where we currently are, and how we find it to work as design leaders in a bureaucratic context.
I’m no longer the only head of design in the German gov’t, and I’m very glad about that. Today, @sprind-en.bsky.social’s Head of UX Design, Arne Petersen, and I had an extended lunch exchange. We talked about our overlapping areas of work, culture clashes, and potential collaborations. Great start
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) June 23, 2025 at 8:58 PM
[image or embed]
I learned that the project now includes about 60 people located across Germany. That means they have solid in-house development capability. However, that is not enough; they are heavily building upon the EU reference framework implementation for the wallet, which is a bottleneck for them and others in the EU. They have several different work streams and continue to differentiate: app, ecosystem, and service integration. They believe that private-sector use cases will significantly surpass public-sector use cases. Eventually, I can see the existing eID app, called AusweisApp, to be entirely obsolete once they launch. We discussed a good real-world use case to demo benefits to users — something we did back in 2022 for the updated letter that gets sent when people receive a new identification document. There, we gave an overview of what you can do with eID functionality.
I wonder how their design language can be brought together with that of the umbrella brand. One year ago, they examined KERN’s design system to see how it could benefit them. At the time, it didn’t offer anything for that mobile-first app work. So, I understand they looked elsewhere.
We discussed how we can collaborate. After our meeting, I shared our Use ID project learnings and recommendations. Our open documentation from that project on GitHub is vast.
Once their work has progressed, they would be happy to have a Service Standard peer review and contribute to good practice write-ups as well. Of course, I would be interested in seeing us experiment and prototype with their Wallet, digital certificates and their service integration modules as soon as they are ready.
What’s next
Next week, I will host a NExT community session on ‘user-centricity with the Service Standard’. We have some 40 signups for it.
I will try to work on our discipline page again, after a very long break.