Author

About Reinhard Riedl

Prof. Dr Reinhard Riedl is a lecturer at the Institute of Digital Technology Management at BFH Wirtschaft. He is involved in many organisations and is a member of the steering committee of TA-Swiss. He is also a board member of eJustice.ch, Praevenire - Verein zur Optimierung der solidarischen Gesundheitsversorgung (Austria) and All-acad.com, among others.

Entries by Reinhard Riedl

The Digital Sins – Part 1: Focusing on Trivialities

30. December 2025/in Column EN, Transdisciplinary EN/by Reinhard Riedl

IMD continually reports on Switzerland’s great successes in digitalisation, yet reality feels quite different. And the vote on eID confirmed doubts about the scientifically measured achievements. What is it that science fails to see? Yes! Yes! Yes! And: No! Yes, digitalisation is no cure-all – often it even creates new problems. Yes, it is blocked […]

Promoting Mental Health: The Potential of Social Robots in Schools

The mental health of students is a central component of successful learning and healthy social and emotional development. How can a social robot support this? What tasks and roles can it take on to assist teachers? A research team at Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) is exploring these questions. Social robots are becoming increasingly […]

Digital democracy research that we really need

2. October 2025/in Column EN, Digital Government EN/by Reinhard Riedl

Liberal democracy is on the retreat worldwide. Only one small country is putting up resistance, Switzerland. For how much longer? Digitalisation is promoting the rise of autocracies, but can it also help the guardians of democracy? Recently, a former student, now responsible for digitalisation in her company, asked me the question: “Why do people accept […]

Secure and trustworthy data rooms – a factual tour d’horizon

11. September 2025/in Digital Identity, Privacy & Cybersecurity EN, Event report EN/by Reinhard Riedl

The 17th Conference on IT and Law took place on 26 August at Bern City Hall and was dedicated to the topic of data rooms from a regulatory and economic perspective. The conference revealed that there are many unanswered questions, but also some initial good projects. What are data rooms? People understand the term in […]

It started in Murten – the goal is a Swiss e-government architecture

14. August 2025/in Column EN, E-Government EN/by Reinhard Riedl

Switzerland wants an e-government architecture. This article explains why this project is so important. What it is about The organisational IT maturity of the public sector is crucial for its efficiency. If the organisational IT maturity is low, many institutions cannot work efficiently, i.e. institutions in public administration, security authorities and the judiciary, infrastructure providers, […]

Digital sovereignty, data spaces and large language models

30. June 2025/in Digital Government EN, Event report EN/by Reinhard Riedl

What does “digital sovereignty” mean in practice and how does it relate to the Swiss LLMs that are currently being developed? The article shows: Digital sovereignty requires national LLMs. Digital sovereignty is a political goal for Switzerland that is practically unattainable in its entirety. The question therefore arises: To what extent should it be achieved? […]