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Federalism and e-government are important to many countries across the globe but come up with two contradicting characteristics that are especially existent in Germany. First, citizens and businesses want to receive e-government services easily but the identification of government entities that are responsible for service delivery in federal states is difficult. Second, e-government has to react to fast developments but decision-making is distributed and rather slow in federal states. To address the area of tension between federalism and e-government, we suggest seven polices that raise internal efficiency and external simplicity of federalism in Germany. We transfer existing policies of e-government literature and practice to our research problem in the course of discussions in a research group of five people. The policies are evaluated in semi-structured interviews with eleven leaders from the German government. The evaluation reveals the appropriateness of the policies to address the issues of federalism in e-government.

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PurposeGovernmental institutions must cooperate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This article addresses the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms. Design/methodology/approachFollowing the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations. FindingsDiscussions in the project's focus groups add evidence to the researchers' expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance. Research limitations/implicationsThis article includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project's stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings. Practical implicationsThe method developed in this article allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level. Originality/valueThe main contribution of this article is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.

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