Public administration · municipalities · state authorities

Steering happens through products. Work happens in processes.

Since the move to accrual accounting, administrations have planned and steered through products. The work itself follows processes – with a trigger, steps, an outcome and a legal basis. The schedule of responsibilities is meant to connect the two worlds and is in practice out of date on the day it is signed. Ordivis Platform puts the product plan, the process catalogue and your organisational structure into one system – and derives the schedule of responsibilities from them.

5,019 administrative processes as a reference 148 products of the municipal product plan On-premises in your own data centre
Product catalogue Process catalogue Process map Organisational structure Posts & appointments Officer functions Org chart Schedule of responsibilities Audit report Editions with a checksum
462specialist tasks
100 %processes with a legal basis
3administrative levels, filterable
CC BYKGSt material, 3.0 DE
The break

Two orders that do not talk to each other

The administration keeps its range of services in the product plan and its responsibilities in the schedule of responsibilities. What it does, is in neither of them.

The product plan answers what money is spent on – it is an instrument of budget control and was never meant to describe work. The schedule of responsibilities answers who is responsible; it is created as a text document, issued as an annex to the rules of procedure, and ages from the first reorganisation onwards. And the process – what actually happens – is at best recorded in a third tool that is connected to neither of the two.

The consequences are familiar: responsibilities nobody can evidence any more. Onboarding that consists of hearsay. Deputising rules that cannot be found when someone falls ill. And with every reorganisation the same manual work, because responsibility was maintained hundreds of times individually instead of once.

Product-oriented – yesterday's state

  • The product plan steers the budget, not the work.
  • The schedule of responsibilities is a text document dated at issuance.
  • Responsibility hangs on people, not on posts.
  • Processes are, if at all, described in a separate tool.
  • A reorganisation means: everything again by hand.

Process-oriented – what Ordivis Platform makes of it

  • Product and process sit in one catalogue, related to each other.
  • The schedule of responsibilities is generated from the data, not written.
  • Responsibility hangs on the organisational unit and on posts.
  • The process is the carrier – with a legal basis and an administrative level.
  • A reorganisation means: touch the org chart, nothing else.
Building block 1

A reference catalogue that is already there

No rollout project, no Excel import, no external consultancy just to get started. The municipal product plan and the process catalogue are shipped and searchable from the first start.

WhatScopeNote
Main areas6the top level of the municipal product plan
Product areas1613 of them carry processes
Product groups41
Products148the level at which ownership is assigned
specialist tasks462the link between product and process
Administrative processes5,0194,518 core, 445 support, 56 management processes
with a legal basis5,019every process names its norm
with a LeiKa reference4,389a link to the administrative service catalogue
Administrative levels3municipality/city (1,718), municipal association (2,925), state (376)

Every process is assigned to a product area

That is the point at which the two orders meet: there is no process in the catalogue that points into nothing. The reverse does not hold – 13 of the 16 product areas carry processes; sports funding, economy and tourism, and central financial services are not covered in the process catalogue. We write that down because it is true.

A catalogue is not an inventory

The catalogue is a reference and creates no configuration items. Only adoption creates a business process in your inventory – for the processes your administration actually carries out. Adoption is repeatable, shows a preview beforehand and creates nothing twice.

The reason is practical: 5,019 processes as records would be 5,019 numbers, audit lines and search hits for material that a single municipality to a considerable extent never carries out. A catalogue that makes search unusable helps nobody.

A process map instead of a list

Three bands – management, core, support – with tiles and counts, by click all the way to the process list. Filtering is by administrative level and process type; the level is preset to municipality/city, because without a filter there would be 5,019 processes and thus no map.

Source: material of the KGSt (the German municipal association for administrative management), licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE. The source note appears in the product wherever catalogue data becomes visible.

Building block 2

Your administration, mapped in full

Not an org chart to look at, but the structure the schedule of responsibilities rests on.

Units

Departments, divisions, offices, sections, staff units and municipal enterprises – create, change, move, delete. When moving, a cycle check prevents upside-down trees; only what no longer carries anything is deleted.

Posts

With the post identifier as it appears in the schedule, and the post size in full-time equivalents. Exactly one post per unit is the head – as a post, not as a person field.

Appointments

With a share and a validity. Two people at 50 % each are two appointments; the total may not exceed 100 %. Deputies do not count towards it – they apply during absence.

Officer functions

Information security, data protection, fire safety, equal opportunity officers – with assignment and deputy in one entry. Explicitly separated from software permissions and crisis team roles.

Org chart

Drawn from the same data, exportable as PNG for the manual, the notice board and reports. No second place to maintain that drifts apart.

CSV exchange

A flat table, one line per post – the form in which an administration keeps its organisation anyway. The export is at the same time the import template: download it, extend it in Excel, play it back.

Why the head role is a post

A person reference on the record cannot represent what is everyday reality in an administration: a vacant, a shared or a covered head role. The head role is therefore a post with a marker, and whoever holds it is an appointment with a share and a period. A change in the head of department changes the appointment – not the schedule of responsibilities.

Nothing is deleted

A dissolved post and an ended appointment are ended as of a reference date, not removed. Older editions of the schedule of responsibilities therefore stay readable – and a responsibility from three years ago can still be evidenced.

Building block 3

The schedule of responsibilities follows

It is not written but derived from the product assignment and the organisational structure – and every statement shows where it comes from.

  1. One product, one organisational unit

    You assign a product to a unit. That establishes ownership for all processes of that product. When the head of department changes, the org chart is touched – not every individual process.

  2. The individual case trumps the rule

    An explicit entry on the process takes precedence over the derivation. The exception stays possible without becoming maintenance work for everything else.

  3. The provenance is right there

    In the list, the detail view and the PDF you can see whether a responsibility is inherited or maintained. An inherited entry must not look like a confirmed one – otherwise nobody checks it any more.

  4. Responsibility, consultation, information

    These inherit downwards instead and can be assigned at product, specialist task or process level. Ownership stays untouched by this: it comes from exactly one source.

  5. The audit report names the gaps

    Processes without ownership, duplicate ownership, products without a unit, units without a head, orphaned assignments. A plan that names its own gaps is worth more than one that looks complete.

  6. Editions that can be cited

    An edition freezes the data state, the PDF and its SHA-256 checksum, with the issue date and the author. The reference-date query reads the edition instead of reconstructing the state – and two editions can be compared.

Online Access Act

The same administration, seen from outside

The OZG implementation catalogue orders administrative services not by authority but by the situation in which people and businesses need them: 18 topic fields, 54 life and business situations, 575 services. It is thus the outside view of exactly the administration that the product plan and the process catalogue describe from within – and in Ordivis Platform both sides are connected.

  • Every service finds its processes. The link is made through the LeiKa key at product level – it points to one product, but to up to 722 individual processes. Ownership follows from the product assignment: whoever is responsible in the schedule is responsible for the OZG service too.
  • Implementation status per service. OZG maturity level 0 to 4, the type of implementation (in-house development, EfA reuse, EfA provision, portal network), the processing specialist system and the online service.
  • The digitalisation status follows. Maturity levels, implementation types and degree of assignment per topic field and per organisational unit – without maintaining a second list.
  • The audit report names the break in the chain. Maturity level 2 without a specialist system on file, EfA reuse without naming the provider, a service without an assignment.
  • Federal standard texts included. Full text, required documents, deadlines, costs and legal bases from the federal FIM catalogues – shipped with the product, usable without internet access.
  • Reconciliation against the federal master processes. On request the modelled reference flow is fetched and set against your approved process definition.

What the source does not give, we do not claim

The executing level is stated in the LeiKa typology – and at one decisive point it does not distinguish further: for many services the value reads „state or municipality“, because state law decides per federal state who executes. Ordivis Platform shows exactly that instead of deriving a municipal responsibility from it. The filter „only what concerns us“ therefore hides only what demonstrably concerns another level.

And: „not yet assessed“ is a state of its own, not maturity level 0. Counting a statement that was not made as „information only“ would make the digitalisation status look systematically better than it is.

In practice

What this changes on a Tuesday

  • Reorganisation: An office is split. You move units and reassign products – the plan follows.
  • Illness: Who deputises for the data protection officer? It is on the entry, not in an email from 2023.
  • Onboarding: A new case worker sees which processes her post carries and on what legal basis.
  • Audit: Responsibility as of a reference date – from the frozen edition, with a checksum.
  • Digitalisation: The process is described before its automation is discussed.
  • Information security: The process hangs on the configuration items that carry it – the same data as in the ISMS.
We show what is

What this area does not do

Part of our maxim is to name the limits before you find them in operation.

  • No substitute for your rules of procedure. The generated plan is a basis – you issue it.
  • The catalogue is not your administration. It is reference material; which processes you keep is your decision.
  • Three product areas without processes. Sports funding, economy and tourism, central financial services.
  • No workflow automation of the specialist system. The process is described; it is executed in your specialist systems.
  • The product catalogue, the schedule and the OZG catalogue appear only with the organisation type public administration. Process and organisational structure are open to everyone.
  • No report to the portal network. The implementation status is kept and evaluated at your site – Ordivis Platform reports nothing to the Digital Administration dashboard.
  • Ordivis Platform is in pilot operation – the first pilot customer is working productively with it; generally available from 1 January 2027. See the module maturity.
Frequently asked questions

Answered briefly and honestly

What is the difference between the product plan and the process catalogue?

The product plan structures the range of services for budget control – it answers what money is spent on. The process catalogue describes how the service is delivered: trigger, steps, outcome, legal basis. Both describe the same administration from two angles; Ordivis Platform brings them together.

Does the catalogue create 5,019 records in my system?

No. The catalogue creates no configuration items. Only adoption creates a business process in the inventory – repeatable, with a preview, without duplication.

Where does the data come from?

From the material of the KGSt, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany (CC BY 3.0 DE). The source note is stored as a date on the catalogue state instead of hard-wired into the program – a new catalogue state brings its own note with it.

Why is ownership derived instead of maintained on the process?

Because otherwise every change in the head of department triggers hundreds of individual edits. One assignment of product to unit carries all processes of that product; the explicit entry on the process remains possible as an exception.

Can I take over my existing organisational structure?

Yes, via CSV with one line per post. The export delivers exactly the columns the import expects. A preview before writing, rejected lines are reported instead of swallowed, a second run changes nothing.

Do I need the other modules for this?

No – but they share the data. The business process is the same configuration item that emergency management, the ISMS and the record of processing refer to. Describe the process once and you have it everywhere.

See what is already running today.

We show you the Organisation area on real data – the catalogue, the organisational structure and a generated schedule of responsibilities, in a video call.

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