Dr Anna Sinell, Head of the Division, Instruments of Administrative Digitalisation, DigitalServices, Germany

1) How do you use your role to ensure that technology and policy are truly inclusive?

My role as Head of Policy Instruments for Digital Transformation is to strategically bridge the gap between innovation and widespread adoption.

I see every pilot project as a live laboratory to systematically extract deep, unvarnished insights into governance, procurement, and regulatory hurdles. These findings are translated into scalable Policy Instruments and Standards, acting as critical levers for digital transformation across the public sector.

This approach requires implementing Policy-by-Design, ensuring new legislation is inherently digital and citizen-centric from the start. 

2) What’s a moment in your career when you saw firsthand how technology or a new policy changed a citizen’s life for the better?

The clearest example was with the modernized Electricity Tax Law in Germany, where we faced a twenty-fold increase in relief applications that threatened to overwhelm our agencies.

The interdisciplinary team and user-centred approach ensured the policy instrument mandated end-to-end digital processing and data standardization years ahead of schedule. This systemic Policy-by-Design approach created the prerequisite for automated tax relief.

Consequently, this change delivered an estimated €15.4 million annual reduction in bureaucracy costs for businesses. 

3) What was the most impactful project you worked on this year, and how did you measure its success in building trust and serving the needs of the public?

The most impactful project this year was leading the cross-governmental effort to develop and formalise the new service standard and its technical underpinning, the DIN SPEC 66336 on behalf of and in close cooperation with the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation.

The service standard is not just a document; it is the creation of a unified, mandatory quality framework for Germany’s digital administration. Success in serving public needs was measured by the Standard's foundational ability to define quality criteria around core user requirements: accessibility, usability, and reliability.

By codifying criteria like "Understanding Users" and "Securing Barrier-Free Use," we ensured that every future digital service is built with the citizen, not the bureaucracy, at its centre.    

4) What was one unexpected lesson you learned this year about designing for real people? This can be about a specific project or a broader lesson about your work.

The most unexpected lesson I learned this year is that the choice of method plays a decisive role in comprehension. This insight came during our work on Funding the Expansion of All-Day Schools (Förderung des Ganztagsausbaus), where the policy landscape was notoriously complex.

We approached it using Service Design, mapping the entire funding ecosystem through User Journeys. This visualisation was the key: the policy department's spontaneous feedback was, “You are the first team who has actually understood this.”

It demonstrated that Service Design methods are a highly effective way to understand complexity and to develop practical policy instruments that work for real people. 

5) We hear a lot about AI. What's a practical example of how AI can be used to make government services more inclusive and trustworthy?

A practical application of AI is its use as a policy instrument to translate complex, existing policies into unambiguous visualizations and decision trees.

This not only enhances inclusion by instantly clarifying eligibility for citizens with low literacy but also builds trust by ensuring policy interpretation is consistent and transparent across all administrative touchpoints. This method turns chaotic complexity into reliable, equitable public service delivery. 

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6) How are you preparing for the next wave of change in the public sector? What new skill, approach, or technology are you most excited to explore in the coming year?

I am preparing by shifting our focus to adaptive governance models, allowing us to quickly integrate technological shifts like AI, and I am most excited to explore the scalable architecture of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to standardise and accelerate service delivery across jurisdictions.

7) What advice do you have for public sector innovators who want to build a career focused on serving all citizens?

My advice is to recognise that innovation is a team effort: Focus on the essential elements of team building, collaboration, and identifying strategic impact.

8) Who inspires you to build a more inclusive and trustworthy public sector?

I am deeply inspired by Jennifer Pahlka, particularly her core philosophy articulated in her book, Recoding America: the idea that we must focus on fixing the implementation layer of government - the actual service delivery - as the truest form of policy. 

9) If you had an unlimited budget, what would your dream project be?

With an unlimited budget, my dream project would be to fully implement proactive, life-event-based social benefits in Germany - where the state automatically disburses entitled aid, for example, to parents after a child is born.

This requires the complete and successful Register Modernization to truly enable the Once-Only Principle (OO). My focus would be on establishing this technical and legal foundation to transform the government from a burdensome bureaucracy into a trustworthy, proactive service provider. 

10) Outside tech, what excites you the most?

Outside of tech, I am captivated by the nature: seeing a massive fruit and vegetables grow from a tiny seed - it's a process of long-term investment, patience, and creating the right environment.

This mirrors my work in policy: success requires careful nurturing of the digital public infrastructure (the soil) and clear policy instruments (the nutrients) to ensure our small innovations ultimately yield abundant, reliable public value.