Digital business needs digital sovereignty

When people talk about digital sovereignty, they are often talking about political and social perspectives with far-reaching implications: Are our Bundestag and our administrations too dependent on Microsoft? (Yes!) Do we have sovereignty over our data – or can every aspect of our lives be monetized by others? Are we allowed to use and repair things we have bought as we wish? Is our digital infrastructure sufficiently protected?

All these questions seem so big and perhaps academic – but there are practical implications that you should consider when setting up your business.

Entrepreneurial focus: ability to act

(Not only) as entrepreneurs, it is important that we are able to implement new ideas and react quickly to new influences – this is what we call the ability to act. This is not a new requirement that has only arisen as a result of digitalization, but it has taken on a new dimension in recent years.
At its core, it is about the fact that we are dependent on the services and products of others in a complex world. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but an expression of a differentiated economy with a division of labor.

At the same time, however, a kind of feudalism is spreading in the digital space, in which this complex network is used to deliberately create dependencies in order to prevent switching between providers and to impose arbitrary license conditions and price expectations.

In cases such as Broadcom’s purchase of VMware, license models were replaced by subscriptions from one day to the next and short-term price changes of over 1,000% were imposed – especially on major customers such as AT&T. Broadcom is deliberately acting against the interests of its own customers and is focusing on maximizing profits for a limited period of time by ripping off a manageable number of customers.

In other cases, we outsource our companies’ data and cannot trust what happens to it. Unfortunately, the realization is now that even with services for business customers and while you pay for a service, the dedicated processing of the data on your own behalf is not guaranteed: after the purchase of Github by Microsoft, it quickly became clear that all code – and especially from private archives of paying customers – is used to train Copilot and competitors are thus able to generate code that is obviously related to secret code of paying customers.

Establishing the ability to act – the ethical imperative and a small-scale approach

With the large number of digital tools that play a role in building your own products, services and company, it’s easy to lose track. Nobody knows which provider might put me in an unpleasant situation tomorrow. One thing is clear: we can’t do everything ourselves, but we shouldn’t leave ourselves completely at the mercy of others either.

For me, the ethical imperative and the realization that there is not one big solution for all problems serves me here in everyday life. The ethical imperative says that when evaluating the possible options for a decision, we should give preference to the solution that gives us as many more options as possible for the future. It is clear that this is not always cheap, because options have costs. But you should at least keep an eye on whether a decision will restrict me in the future or give me more leeway.

On the other hand, I don’t have to (and shouldn’t) put the entire development of the company on one card: instead of making a big, serious decision, a small-scale approach in which I can decide in one direction or another depending on the situation is more robust in the long term.

Creating options – with open source

One very clear point with which we can decide whether we have more or fewer options in the future is the use of open source. With open source, I have the most freedom and a categorically different relationship with the tool used than with a SaaS solution, for example. In fact, the options with open source are unlimited: instead of having to choose between two products, I always have the option – if it makes strategic or tactical sense
and adapt or further develop the tool according to my own needs. And the whole thing can also be economical if you set up appropriate collaborations.

Does that mean I always have to dogmatically use open source? Of course not. But: knowing when open source brings me advantages and “striking” at the right moment makes us much more capable of acting.

Increasing effectiveness – building skills

For me, the second building block for increasing our own digital sovereignty is the development of skills: in order to move away from a pure manufacturer/user relationship, we need an attitude in the company that IT is actually a very accessible and permeable discipline. On the one hand, it is clear that not everyone in the team should be able to program. But a basic understanding of how the digital world works and what is fundamentally possible also helps to evaluate solutions and think creatively. I think that the separation between non-IT people and IT people, which often has a low self-esteem, is fatal.