Digital sovereignty, due to current events, is a concept which occurs quite often in German political buzzword bingo. The idea is that Europe’s countries alone or together in the European Union reduce their dependency on technology suppliers from countries outside of Europe.
What is digital sovereignty?
Together with folks from Deutsche Telekom AG, I gave a webinar a few weeks back. They summed up actions that European and German organizations can take. However, the current truth is: Absolute sovereignty is nearly impossible to achieve due to hardware & software dependencies.
Taking up their categories, I presented sovereignty mechanisms which are available to ServiceNow customers.
I will not go into details on the legal aspects in this post.
The following slide looks at ServiceNow operations and basically shows that the statement is true: Customer can achieve data and operational sovereignty. One of the cool examples the colleagues from Deutsche Telekom AG presented was from T-Systems International GmbH. They have a fully sovereign ServiceNow installation which is called DoItNow and which they use to manage their IT services business with. And trust me: they know their sh*t on security.
But what about technology? Well, I live in Magdeburg in Germany. The plan to build Intel chips here was just taken off the table. And I do not think that it is likely that any of the German companies like Siemens etc. will soon start working in that segment again. But what about the space ServiceNow takes? The software space.
For software, there are alternatives to ServiceNow.
If you want to go full throttle in terms of custom software and sort of start from scratch, I think initiatives like https://deutschland-stack.gov.de/ are interesting to look at. As always it is a make or buy decision whether the requirements justify a custom software project. This stack is in progress and driven by the German government.
There are also point solutions like https://www.matrix42.com/ which support specific application areas like IT management. This solution is sold by a company based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
There are workflow management solutions like https://camunda.com/ from Berlin, Germany. I showed students in a modelling course once that you could insert BPMN diagrams directly into the Camunda engine. Quite cool. I also posted on my old user name about Camunda here: Camunda vs. ServiceNow - ServiceNow Community
So, there are alternatives, but ServiceNow is still the better choice. Why?
Because of time to market. ServiceNow can be swiftly implemented. There are a lot of partners which can scale, and which will jump on any project. Furthermore, partners will get competition soon because artificial intelligence will help implement ServiceNow in areas that are well understood. This will reduce project risk and implementation costs.
The product teams at ServiceNow not only listen to what Anthropic’s CEO thinks and his company builds into its general purpose AI (https://youtu.be/N5JDzS9MQYI?si=XOh-fjaRIi1lsSi_). They can execute. R&D is not just a word at ServiceNow. We build the state-of-the-possible into ServiceNow’s platform. We are the AI control tower for business reinvention.
So, I think the above alternatives are less attractive than some may think.
To sum up, seeing the opportunism and fighting in the European Union, I am afraid, from a tax-payer perspective, that some of my taxes will continue to go to a software company in the US. I do not see a company that can enter this space. Even SAP is not as agile as ServiceNow is. But, also from a tax-payer perspective: ServiceNow delivers. In time. Or even ahead of it. With a return on investment in savings for government and in citizen satisfaction.
