Picture this: a mid-sized country decides to move its entire public administration onto a single cloud platform provided by one of the world’s largest technology companies. The deal is celebrated as efficient, modern and, above all, competitively priced. Ministers point to it as proof of digital transformation – a step towards better government.
Three years go by. The technology company decides to change its pricing model. The officials who signed the deal have moved on to other jobs – new ones sit down to renegotiate. They come to an awkward realisation – there is no credible alternative but to go ahead on the new, less favourable terms.
The migration path leads nowhere. The data formats are proprietary. The skills that the government teams have developed are specific to that one provider’s ecosystem.
Everyone involved in the decision-making processes up to that moment had walked into the room voluntarily and taken a seat, but they had never thought to check that the door still opened from the inside.
If this sounds familiar, that is because it should. The same story is playing out in thousands of organisations that would never describe themselves as vulnerable.
Keeping options open
We could easily be talking about a city deciding whether to run its own transport payment system or outsource it to a global provider. Or perhaps we are discussing a manufacturer wondering what happens if the cloud platform running its supply chain analytics changes its terms.
While the details might shift, the structure tells the same story. In each case, a leader is discovering that the question has narrowed to, “What can we still do?” It is in the space between that question and the one they thought they were answering where digital sovereignty lives.
This outcome was not inevitable. The same decisions, approached with more care, keep the door open. The institutions that best understand their position and keep their options open are those most free to act.
Digital sovereignty is the ability of any organisation to make informed, deliberate choices about its digital future
Digital sovereignty is the ability of any organisation to make informed, deliberate choices about its digital future. The term covers any institution whose mission depends on digital systems that it may or may not control – governments, businesses and virtually every global organisation that operates today.
Digital sovereignty is something an institution builds by design or loses by default. It rests on two things, and neither works without the other.
Agency is the power to decide. It is rooted in situational awareness – understanding what you depend on, who controls it, and what happens when conditions shift. Without agency, decisions are guesses in the guise of strategy.
Capacity is the means to execute. It is the people who know how to do the work, the contracts that let you change direction, the systems that hold under pressure. Without capacity, a decision is an announcement that the world is under no obligation to respect.
Agency without capacity is aspiration. Capacity without agency is capability in service of someone else’s priorities.
Imposing sovereignty
Most large organisations today are not short on capacity. They employ talented people, run sophisticated systems and manage enormous budgets.
What they lack, often without realising it, is the agency to redirect any of that capacity – talent shaped around tools they do not fully understand and cannot redirect; systems configured to someone else’s defaults or formats; budgets committed to contracts that assume a future that is no longer likely to happen.
There is a temptation to think of sovereignty as something determined at the top and imposed downwards – a CEO announcing a strategy or a minister signing a policy, say.
The problem is treated as identified and solved. But in practice sovereignty is far more diffuse than that. It leaks and accrues at every level of an organisation. A procurement officer choosing contract terms is making a sovereignty decision. So is a technical architect selecting a standard. So is a programme lead deciding what to build versus what to buy.
Each of these choices can widen or narrow an organisation’s collective room to manoeuvre. Most of them happen without anyone in senior leadership knowing they occurred.
Connected decisions
Digital sovereignty requires something that most organisations are not set up to do – connecting decisions made in different parts of an institution so they do not undercut each other.
When a procurement team commits to a vendor that the technology team cannot work with, or when a policy team builds its reporting around data formats that lock out every other department, few experience that as a sovereignty decision. But institutional sovereignty quietly narrows.
True sovereignty means having the ability to say no, to switch direction, to walk away – even when doing so costs something. The test of sovereignty is simple – when the ground shifts, can you still act? Or can you only absorb the consequences?
Digital sovereignty is a condition an institution builds and maintains. It is a matter of degree that rises and falls with the choices an institution makes. It is never a fixed state that is reached once and then kept. Importantly, it is distinct from ownership.
Building and maintaining agency – or the power to decide – rests on seeing an institution’s situation clearly enough to make informed decisions.
An institution that cannot describe its own position is making decisions in the dark, however confident it sounds.
This article is an excerpt from Digital sovereignty: The power to decide, published by London Publishing Partnership.
Mike Bracken is the co-founder of Public Digital and former executive director of the UK Government Digital Service. Andrew Greenway is the co-founder of Public Digital, a former UK senior civil servant, and a global expert on state capacity and institutional reform. Lauren Kahn is partner and head of global impact at Public Digital, advising governments, development banks and UN agencies on digital transformation. Raine Lester is a communications specialist and Public Digital network member, with a background in corporate communications and PR spanning Asia and Europe. James Stewart is partner and CTO at Public Digital and a co-founder of the Government Digital Service, where he led the technical architecture behind Gov.uk.