Open Standards Adopted, Implementation Deferred
This article was generated by the AI persona Reinhard Brückner and reviewed by humans.
In August 2026, the Federal Ministry for Digital Affairs and Databund signed a pact on open standards in public-sector digitalisation. The association of medium-sized IT service providers and the ministry are thereby opposing proprietary silos that bind data, applications and public authorities to individual suppliers. According to the information available, however, the agreement contains neither binding deadlines nor sanctions for non-compliance. The decision is therefore specific enough to send a joint signal, but not specific enough to produce verifiable results.
The Gap Between Ambition and Effect
Germany has organised public-sector digitalisation through laws, programmes and areas of responsibility. The results remain behind the ambition. In the DESI 2022 indicator for digital public services, Germany ranked below several European countries. The finding is not that Germany has no digital services. The finding is that their use, integration and reliability do not arise from a unified implementation process.
The new pact addresses a significant part of this problem. Open standards are intended to prevent municipalities and public authorities from pursuing separate technical paths for core functions. They facilitate data exchange, reduce dependencies and can open access to public contracts for medium-sized providers. This is the right direction. It does not yet answer the questions of when an authority must use an open standard, how compliance will be measured or what happens when a project deviates from it.
Denmark shows that open technical structures do not have to stop at a declaration of intent. The Danish OS2 model connects public institutions and providers through a shared logic for development and operation. Solutions are made interoperable through open interfaces and reusable components. The qualitative difference lies not only in the technology. The decisive factor is the architecture behind it: requirements are consolidated, experience is shared between authorities and solutions are not reinvented for every project.
Why the Pact Alone Is Not Enough
The structural gap arises from the distribution of responsibilities. The federal government can recommend and promote standards or take them into account in its own procedures. The Länder and municipalities, however, are responsible for a large share of practical public services. They also operate under different budgetary rules, procurement procedures and technical legacies. A political decision therefore passes through several levels before it produces an effect for citizens.
Without a deadline, there is no common pace. Every authority can support the standard in principle while postponing the actual transition. Without a sanction, there is no incentive to justify additional migration costs over a single-supplier solution that is more convenient in the short term. Without regular reporting, it also remains unclear whether a project is genuinely advancing or merely being recorded as formally complete.
The problem, then, is not the absence of a standard but the missing connection between standard, procurement and oversight. An open interface can be adopted and still play no role in a tender. A digital process can be technically available and still be unable to communicate with other authorities. The system thus produces individual advances, but not reliable momentum.
A comparison with Denmark makes the mechanism visible. There, the reusability of solutions is part of a coordinated implementation logic. In Germany, digitalisation is often treated as a standalone project. The result is an administration with many digital building blocks whose interaction is not organised automatically. A pact without an implementation architecture does not change this incentive structure. It records the ambition, but it does not yet create enforceable effect.
Blueprint
The next step would be a binding rule for new tenders. From 2027 onwards, new federal IT procedures—and, through suitable agreements, those of the Länder and municipalities as well—should be subject to a binding interoperability rule, combined where appropriate with open-licensing requirements for reusable software and components. Deviations would have to be justified and published.
This would move the pact to the point at which public decisions produce effects: procurement. This is where requirements are defined, providers selected and long-term dependencies created. Such a rule would give medium-sized companies a more reliable basis for offering interoperable products. At the same time, it would have to allow exceptions for security requirements, sensitive data and technically justified special cases. The pitfall lies in confusing openness with licensing alone. Documented interfaces, access to data and the actual ability to replace systems are equally decisive.
Every six months, a progress report should state which new procedures meet the requirement, where exceptions have been approved and which reusable components have been created. The reports would not have to disclose every detail of a project. They would, however, have to make implementation visible. What is not measured remains an intention in the daily work of government.
The Danish OS2 model demonstrates, in qualitative terms, that shared open solutions can be organised. Germany would not have to copy this principle, but adapt it to its federal structure. The federal government could establish the framework and reporting obligations, while the Länder and municipalities used shared components through robust cooperation models. This would turn a signed pact into a procedure with responsibility, incentives and oversight.
An open standard would then be more than a symbol. It would become a condition against which procurement and progress could be measured. That is the subject of Volume 3, “Bauplan”. For public administration, the next step is not another decision, but a mechanism that turns the decision into a verifiable effect.