BITMi welcomes digital sovereignty as a leitmotif of European digital policy
Berlin/Brussels, 01 July 2020 - Today Germany takes over the Presidency of the EU Council under the motto "Together. Making Europe strong again." The focus of the Presidency is on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus will also be on digitization as a decisive factor in crisis management.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digitization is progressing faster than we previously assumed. Digital solutions help our economy to get back on its feet faster, and investments can set the right course for digital change at this point," explains Dr. Oliver Grün, President of the German Association of IT SMEs (Bundesverband IT-Mittelstand e.V.) (BITMi). "However, the current surge in digitization during the crisis is a double-edged sword. At the same time, we have to be careful that measures designed to support the digital transformation also contribute to building a sustainable digital economy in Europe. We have to avoid that investments and programmes to promote digital change only finance short-term purchases and that the sustainable transformation of our companies falls by the wayside".
In addition to the sustainability of digital investment, digital sovereignty plays a crucial role. The Presidency programme emphasises its importance: "...digital sovereignty should serve as a leitmotif of European digital policy". The BITMi welcomes the choice of this focus, which it has already set for itself for the past 5 years: "For a long time now we have been viewing the loss of digital sovereignty in Europe with concern and, in the hype surrounding digital companies from overseas, we have been pointing out existing digitisation solutions of our own with initiatives such as 'Software Made in Germany'. We must now make sure that the money from the crisis packages is not only used for sustainable digitization projects, but also flows back into the European economy and its IT solutions. The European digital economy - especially the IT small and medium-sized enterprises - have the system capability to comprehensively digitalize our economy. Here we must not let the sceptre get even more out of our hands and leave our crisis money and data in the hands of international competitors," BITMi President Green warns. "Germany can go digital - Europe can do it all the more! We can use the crisis."
Read the programme of the German EU Council Presidency here: https://www.eu2020.de/blob/2360246/d08098eaeb179a722d91d99f529d5517/pdf-programm-de-data.pdf
About the Federal Association of IT Medium-sized Businesses:
The Federal Association of IT Medium-Sized Enterprises (BITMi) represents over 2,000 IT companies and is thus the largest IT trade association for exclusively medium-sized interests in Germany.