Trend Report 2026: IT service providers and public administration

How do public IT service providers and public administrations work together? For the 2026 Trend Report, we examined the role IT service providers play in modernising public administration.

IT service providers ensure the state’s ability to transform

These are the key findings of the 2026 Trend Report:

1. Public IT service providers are indispensable strategic and operational players in digital administration: they not only ensure operations, IT security and support, but also have a significant impact on the state’s ability to transform through process consulting, systems modernisation and introduction of new technologies.
2. The current challenges lie not only in the number of IT service providers, but also in a lack of role clarification, heterogeneous structures and insufficient coordination between administrations and service providers. Fragmented responsibilities, differing expectations and parallel replacement structures are slowing down progress more than the current diversity of providers.
3. Effective digital administration requires clear governance, coordinated priorities and genuine cooperation models – between administrations, IT service providers and across federal levels. Only a common understanding of roles, binding control mechanisms and cooperation based on the division of labour will enable efficiency gains, scalability and innovation – regardless of how consolidated the landscape is.

How can the public IT service provider landscape be further developed?

Four overarching recommendations for action can be derived from the analyses:

Understanding IT and digitalisation as a basic prerequisite: Digital systems have long formed the functional infrastructure of government performance – and are becoming increasingly important in view of demographic change.

Constructively bringing together different perspectives: Technological feasibility and technical and legal requirements must be systematically interlinked in order to enable practical solutions.

Actively clarifying role conflicts between owner and customer roles: Only clearly defined and perceived management responsibility ensures strategic alignment and operational requirements.

Establishing change as a continuous process: Transformation can only succeed with ongoing reflection, adaptation and professional competence and structure management.

Our approach

The Digital State Trend Report is based on a short survey of VITAKO members and discussions with representatives from public administration.

Our strengths in this project

• Many years of knowledge of the public administration sector
• Methodologically sound interviewing
• Derivation of practice-oriented recommendations for action based on the core findings

Links and downloads

To the Trend Report 2026 (PDF, in German)

Previous reports

Project team: Rebaz Ahmad, Shayan Beland, Matthias Canzler, Lea Lataster, Franziska Stader, Inga Stump

Last update: 03.03.2026