Did you fly today? How lack of digital sovereignty could affect YOUR daily life.

Airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, supermarkets, banks, railways, broadcast services... we experienced a worldwide outage in multiple industries today. Many of you were affected by the tech choices of CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CDOs... They have chosen "safe bets", "big brands", "well-known, reliable players".

As tech leaders we have a social responsibility for the tech choices we are making while building our products. Today's outage might be a wake-up call for many tech leaders.

Too big to fail?

It's common to choose well-know service providers with a relevant market share. I mean, everyone does X and Y, so that's good, right? But, what is good for YOUR company? Which technology is necessary to solve the problem YOU are facing? What is good for YOUR use case? And what is good for OUR society?

If we all use the same product, the scale of outages is massive if that product fails. And when it happens, everyone fails and even critical infrastructure can be massively affected. If it fails, it fails big.

Just think about nature... Monoculture leads to an ecosystem collapse. The same applies for society's infrastructure.

Do you want the product to own you or do you want to own the product?

If we as a society create an oligopoly by our choices, the oligopoly has the power over us. ...and the exit from this vendor lock-in might be very painful and expensive. In some cases even nearly impossible.

Do you want to have impact on the product you use or do you want to be a product, even if you pay a lot of money for licenses? More and more companies are deciding to use their customers' content to train AI. Do you want your company's secrets to become training material for AI?

Do you want to have any control over the features of the software you use? If a big tech company decides to discontinue a particular service or feature, they will do so, even if it is critical to you. It can happen overnight, leaving you with a fait accompli.

But nobody is bug free

I'm sure there will be at least a few comments saying "But... Rosanna, nobody is bug free." YES! I prefer to hire smart people and let them use their expertise to solve problems instead of writing support tickets. If you invest in a closed source system, where most of the layers are not visible to you, you have no possibility to do anything in case of a problem. All you can do is wait and write support tickets... I doubt that really smart people want to be stuck in that situation, so your turnover rate might go up.

But it's too expensive...

Germany - not the German companies, but the German country - spent 6 billion euros for long-term Oracle and Microsoft licenses. Imagine what we could produce as a country if we invested 6 billion euros in software development!

There are great investments by the German government, so we are moving in the right direction, but this is just the beginning. Let me just name some of the initiatives investing in the digital sovereignty like Sovereign Tech Agency , SPRIND - Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen or DigitalService . Are you familiar with any others similar initiatives? If so, please link them in the comments! I would love to hear about them.

Do you invest in open source?

Does anyone here use open source? I can tell you: YES, everyone! And how many of you invest in open source software? Specifically, who is investing in the little project in Nebraska?

The more we share, the more we have...

Since 2021, only 0.55% of the German Digital Ministry's software development budget has been invested in open source software development.

And now?

I'm kind of grateful for today's outage. It's a very tangible case that non-technical decision makers can understand. I hope they learn something from it and remember it the next time they make strategic decisions for their company.

In the same way as our teams need diversity of thought in order to be innovative, we need diversity in our society's infrastructure. To become resilient, we need a heterogeneous ecosystem, not only in nature. We need solutions, which we can control.

Thank you to Dr. Michael Müller-Wünsch and people who commented his post (with both positive and negative comments) on digital sovereignty. It inspired me to write down my thoughts.