Forming the digital top in Hesse together
18.12.2025
The heads of the Gießen, Wetzlar, Fulda, Offenbach, Limburg and Bad Nauheim city association met for an intensive planning session on the fringes of the meeting of the Hessian Association of Cities and Towns. "We discussed how we can find joint digital solutions across the boundaries of the individual administrations," reports Offenbach's Lord Mayor Dr. Felix Schwenke.
Lord Mayor Dr. Felix SchwenkeIn recent years, we have jointly initiated projects on the intelligent use of data, employee training and artificial intelligence. We want to develop these further and make our cities smarter and more efficient.
In addition to the mayors, the Competence Centre for Administrative Digitization of the Hessian Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Hessian Association of Cities and Towns also took part - whereby the unique close cooperation of the "IKZ Digitale Kommune@Hessen" association of cities was praised. The Ministry of Digital Affairs in particular is therefore also supporting the various projects with up to 90 percent funding, with the "Digital Municipalities" moving a total of over nine million euros.
"One jointly developed flagship is our analysis tool eGovSAD, which can be used to monitor online services, collect feedback and thus improve them," explains Marius Müller, Head of the Digitalization Stabsstelle coordinating the project for the City of Offenbach. The abbreviation eGovSAD stands for "eGovernment Service and Analysis Dashboard".
"Such tools make our city "smarter", as they say these days: we improve our online services, they become more accessible for citizens and with a service analysis dashboard, we can manage our scarce resources for digitalization in a more targeted way," continues Mayor Schwenke, "the fact that 100 municipalities are now using the tool not only secures operations in the long term, but also shows that we are working on the right pain point to make our cities more accessible and efficient."
Despite the strong support from the state at this point, the Lord Mayor does not miss the opportunity to point out the precarious situation of municipal administrations: "The social and digital transformation is changing the demands on us, we need long-term support from the state and federal government so that we can navigate through this change with competent personnel and sufficient financial resources."