This guest contribution was reposted from LinkedIn and translated with the author’s permission.
I read the FT article somewhere between two meetings. And I had to stop for a moment.
Not because it was so impressive. But because it was so rare. A government saying what it wants, why it wants it, and then simply… starting.
“The important thing is that we become independent from centralised, monopolistic providers. That is what we are striving for, step by step.”
That’s it. That’s the whole strategy. No two-hundred-page vision document. No external consultancy report. Just a sentence everyone understands and that you can be held accountable to.
# A pattern I’ve been seeing for a while
Over the past months I’ve written regularly about digital transformation. About the Nvidia architecture that redrew the infrastructure agenda for all of Europe in two minutes of keynote. About the 83% of European cloud spending flowing to American providers. About a robot that ran the half marathon in Beijing faster than the human world record, and how that evolutionary curve in just one year tells you everything about the pace at which the world is changing.
Each time I came back to the same conclusion: the challenge is rarely technological. The technology is there. The challenge is what we do with it, who makes the decisions, and whether we as a society are still capable of making those choices consciously rather than letting them take control of us.
In that story, Schleswig-Holstein isn’t a footnote. It’s one of the few places where a government asks that question out loud and gives an answer that reaches beyond the next budget cycle.
# The problem has no name, which is why no one sees it
I’m currently doing research on digital transformation in organisations for my master’s thesis. And if I’ve learned one thing from that research, it’s this: most trajectories don’t fail on bad technology. They fail on the absence of a shared answer to the question: what are we actually trying to achieve?
What you see is always the same pattern. It starts with the best of intentions. Buzzwords get launched (digital maturity, future-proof, lean, agile) that everyone nods at when they hear them, but that no one fills in the same way. And then, at the moment real choices have to be made, it turns out the words had created a pseudo-reality. Everyone thought they meant the same thing. They didn’t.
Meyer and Rowan wrote about this back in 1977. Organisations adopt structures and language not always because they work, but because they confer legitimacy. A project called “digital transformation” looks decisive. Whether anything actually changes in how people work and decide is a different question, one that’s rarely asked with the same force.
I see this too in how organisations deal with AI. Not the question of what AI can mean for us, but the question of how we want to be seen because of it. An AI strategy as a status symbol. A chatbot as proof of innovation. Meanwhile daily practice barely changes, or it changes in ways no one consciously chose.
I wrote earlier about the Nature study on bixonimania, a fake disease that AI systems described as real, complete with prevalence figures and treatment recommendations. The mechanism there is the same: systems that speak the language of authority, without the capacity to understand the source. And people who trust that language because they don’t know any better.
Schleswig-Holstein breaks that pattern. They know what they want. That sounds banal, but it’s the foundation everything else rests on.
# Three weeks of fax and telephone in a courtroom
It’s not a success story without bumps, by the way. Far from it.
When 44,000 email accounts were migrated to open source alternatives, messages started landing in the wrong inboxes. Judges stopped getting mail. So did police. For three weeks. Back to fax and telephone, in 2025, in a courtroom.
The cause turned out to be a misconfiguration in the data centre, not the new software. But that distinction doesn’t interest people on the work floor much when their inbox stays empty.
The police union chairman estimates that officers are now losing two to three extra hours per week to the shortcomings of the new tools. He said it diplomatically. But the message was clear: this stops at some point if support runs out.
And then the minister did something I recognise from every transformation trajectory I’ve studied. In the middle of the crisis, he said: you don’t learn to ride a bicycle by watching.
Meant as encouragement. Received as: you’re not trying hard enough.
That kind of moment isn’t innocent. Bowen and Blackmon described it as the spiral of silence: the mechanism by which people stop naming problems because they think no one will back them up, or because the social cost of speaking feels too high. In organisations, that’s lethal. Everyone sees things aren’t going well. Nobody says so. The project rumbles on along the rails of its own momentum.
It’s also why I keep emphasising that digital transformation is people work. Not as a motivational poster. As a sober fact. The best architecture, the most carefully thought-out migration plan, the most solid open source stack: it all stops working when the people on the work floor feel they don’t belong, that their experience doesn’t matter, that the project is rolling over them rather than moving with them.
# Why this is bigger than an IT project
83% of European business cloud spending goes to American providers. Schleswig-Holstein saved 15 million euros on Microsoft licences last year and put that money into German IT companies.
That’s a choice. A conscious, political choice about where public money goes and who holds the knowledge to run public systems.
The minister points to energy. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, everyone suddenly understood what dependency on a single supplier means when that supplier changes its behaviour. Digital infrastructure is no different. It’s just less visible until it isn’t.
I wrote earlier about how geopolitical shifts, from trade tariffs to investment decisions, feed directly into the technological choices that organisations and governments have to make. Schleswig-Holstein is a concrete answer to that. Not perfect. Not finished. But concrete.
Munich tried something similar and gave up after thirteen years. Too many technical problems, too little political patience. Schleswig-Holstein knows that story. They’re going ahead anyway.
The minister says he doesn’t experience this as courageous. Just: being convinced you’re on the right track, and pushing on when it gets difficult.
That’s easier said in an interview than done in a budget meeting. But it’s exactly the attitude missing in most of the trajectories I see up close. Not a lack of technology. Not a lack of budget. A lack of willingness to defend a goal whose costs are visible now and whose benefits aren’t yet.
# The tool is just the tool, here too
There’s something else that strikes me about the Schleswig-Holstein story, and it connects to something I’ve written repeatedly over the past weeks.
The CIO uses an HP laptop. The minister an iPhone. The hardware stays American for now. And that isn’t a contradiction; it’s a deliberate prioritisation. Not everything at once. First the software that touches sovereignty and data most directly. Then the rest.
That’s mature technology policy. Not ideological. Pragmatic, with a clear compass.
And it confirms something I also try to convey in education: the tool is just the tool. Whether it’s about AI in a course, open source in a government, or a migration project in an organisation, the tool is not the answer. The question is the answer. What do you want to be able to do? What do you want to be? What do you not want to be dependent on?
If you don’t ask those questions, the tool chooses for you. And then you’re not doing digital transformation. You’re undergoing a digital takeover.
Schleswig-Holstein isn’t a blueprint you can copy. It’s an experiment, with real problems and real people who notice every day that the new system doesn’t yet do what the old one did.
But it’s an experiment that knows why it exists.
And that, time and again, turns out to be the rarest ingredient of all.
- Bowen, F., & Blackmon, K. (2003). Spirals of Silence: The Dynamic Effects of Diversity on Organizational Voice. Journal of Management Studies, 40(6), 1393-1417. doi.org/10.1111/1467-6486.00385
- Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363. www.jstor.org/stable/2778293