Germany's digitalisation, slowly starting to move

Almost everyone I know in Germany keeps complaining about how far behind we are in terms of digitalisation. And this is for a reason. For decades it has been a mantra: we are too bureaucratic and non-digital in administration, let's do something about it. How about creating another non-digital state institution to fight the high number of non-digital state institutions.

Yes, I agree, Germany needs to speed up in digitalising everything: state services, finances, healthcare.

I am not happy about current state, but I do understand that it is much easier to build a digital system in a small country from scratch, for example post-Soviet Eastern Europe and the Baltics, rather than redo huge German infrastructure existing since the 70s. Germans are also pragmatic and rarely fix things which work. You can still find ATM machines running Windows 3.1 and it seems to be fine for banks. Having worked in eHealth and biotech for over 6 years now, I also know how complex and risky this domain is, how many regulations and safety rules you have, and that also for a reason.

At the same time, I must admit that some progress is actually happening. We finally have prescriptions which are just digital records attached to your insurance card, and not a small pink paper you carry to the pharmacy. Somehow you still need to pick up and carry with you a physical paper when one doctor sends you to another colleague. I would assume that this is a use case much easier to digitalise compared to prescriptions.

Today I learned that in Germany you do not need to carry the car registration papers in original with you anymore (link in comments). This is a small step, but I have a feeling things start to move. I honestly hope that these are the first signs of a mindset shift and that the famous "Digitalisierung" will finally get decent speed.