Digital municipality: The city of Jena improves in BITKOM's Smart City Index

In the BITKOM association's digital ranking of Germany's major cities, the city of Jena climbed 8 places to 34th place in the overall ranking. Jena scored highest in the "Society" category, taking 7th place (+8 compared to the previous year). Among other things, it was assessed whether the city offers public participation formats for citizens, how networked the digital scene is or what opportunities for collaboration are offered in co-working areas or workshops. Start-up initiatives, online platforms for retailers and the city's open data portal were also rated positively.

Manuela Meyer, digitalization officer for the city of Jena, is delighted with the improvement in the ranking:

"The digital ranking is a very good magnifying glass on the status of digitalization in municipalities. For Jena, the result shows us that we are on the right track with our initiatives and projects and that we are already doing a good job of involving citizens. However, in other categories, such as digital administration, the results also clearly show that we still have a lot of homework to do."

Jena ranks 49th in the "Administration" category (-14 compared to the previous year). In the "Energy and environment" (36th overall) and "Mobility" (46th overall) categories, Jena was able to move up 14 and 24 places respectively. The ranking is completed by the category "IT and communication" (overall rating 53; +2 compared to the previous year)

Many citizen services can already be carried out digitally today. An average of 870 people use the online appointments in the Citizen and Family Service every week. Registration information has been available online since July 2021; vehicle registration has been possible online since March 2021. Daycare registrations are almost exclusively done online via the daycare portal. Driving licenses can be displayed digitally and resident parking permits can be applied for or extended. In addition, it is now possible to apply for other services by email, such as the JenaBonus, registration certificates, copies of civil status certificates and parking permits for the severely disabled.

Manuela Meyer says: "The assessment of the Smart City Index is an incentive for us to win further places in the coming year. With the Online Access Act, further services are now gradually being made available online. And with our major projects as part of Smart City and the 5G transport networking project, we will also be able to make progress in mobility and energy management."

With the upcoming founding of the Jena Digital e. V. association with the participation of the city this week, an important step towards strengthening networking and knowledge transfer with players in the digital economy & science is also imminent.

You can find more information on the study here.