Europe Has Digital Ambition - Now It Needs a Way to Implement It

Europe's digital transformation has entered a new phase. For years, the conversation centered around whether organizations should embrace cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital services. In Europe, that question has largely been answered. Businesses now understand that digital capabilities are essential for competitiveness, resilience, and long-term growth.

The conversation has shifted to execution.  

How can organizations translate digital strategies into services that function across departments, partners, providers, industries, and national borders? How do they establish digital business models that are secure, scalable, and practical enough for everyday operations?

The latest FACIS survey of 800 decision-makers from industrial and manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across eight European countries captures this transition. It paints a picture of organizations ready to advance but seeking practical ways to implement digital transformation beyond isolated projects.

Europe is ready for the next stage 

The survey results are remarkably consistent. Nearly nine out of ten organizations have a digitalization strategy in place. Four out of five have an AI strategy. Looking ahead, 92% expect to introduce new digital business models within the next three years.

These numbers indicate that many European businesses have established a strategic foundation. They have identified priorities, invested in capabilities, and begun preparing for new value creation. What comes next is more demanding.

Competitive advantage increasingly hinges on how effectively organizations connect technologies, partners, and data across complex environments:

• Can cloud services, AI applications, and data be merged into new offerings?
• Can organizations collaborate with partners without fostering new dependencies?
• Can they enter new markets without rebuilding every integration from scratch?

These questions are evolving from technology concerns to practical business challenges.

Infrastructure creates opportunities – implementation creates value

A recurring message throughout FACIS Connect was that Europe already possesses many essential ingredients. Cloud infrastructure is continuing to mature. AI capabilities are rapidly developing. Open standards are gaining traction. European initiatives such as the 8ra Initiative and FACIS lay practical foundations for trusted, multi-provider digital infrastructure.

Yet building blocks alone do not create an ecosystem.

Organizations may possess cloud services, AI use cases, modernized infrastructure, and ambitious digital roadmaps, but they can still struggle to exchange data securely with partners, integrate services across providers, or collaborate efficiently across national boundaries. The gap often appears between technical capabilities and operational realities.

Digital infrastructure creates opportunities. Its value emerges when organizations use it to launch new services, collaborate more effectively, reduce complexity, and build sustainable business models. This marks the beginning of Europe’s next phase of digital transformation.

The real barriers appear during implementation

The survey also highlights where organizations encounter friction. Cybersecurity and data protection remain the most frequently cited barriers, followed by implementation costs, regulatory complexity, skills shortages, and legacy infrastructure.

These challenges arise when organizations begin incorporating digital technologies into existing operations.

• A manufacturer introducing AI across its supply chain requires significantly more than just an AI model. It needs trusted access to data, secure interfaces, reliable infrastructure, clearly defined responsibilities, and assurance that every partner can collaborate without exposing sensitive information or losing control over valuable assets.
• A logistics provider launching a cross-border digital service requires more than reliable connectivity. It needs interoperable systems, predictable service quality, compatible contractual arrangements, and governance that spans multiple providers.

Digital transformation becomes considerably more complex once organizations go beyond individual systems and begin collaborating across ecosystems.

Collaboration needs an operating model 

Digital business models increasingly rely on collaboration. Few organizations innovate entirely on their own. AI necessitates trusted data. Digital services often involve multiple providers. Supply chains depend on secure information exchange between organizations that may be partners in one project and competitors in another.

As these relationships become more interconnected, collaboration itself emerges as an operational capability. This is where federation becomes relevant.

Federation is often viewed as a technical architecture, but its significance extends beyond that. It provides organizations with a practical method to collaborate while maintaining independence. Each participant retains control over its own systems, data, and decisions, while common standards, interoperability, and shared governance enable services to work together across organizational boundaries. This reflects the central vision behind FACIS, which positions federation as a decentralized model for trusted collaboration without centralizing data or control.

This approach holds particular relevance for Europe. Europe's economy is built on industrial specialization, innovative SMEs, regional strengths, and diverse service providers. These strengths become even more valuable when organizations can combine their capabilities without being tethered to a single platform or provider.

Federation creates the conditions for that kind of collaboration. The aviation proof of concept shows what this can look like in practice: independent actors in the aviation ecosystem can exchange data and use services across organizational boundaries while retaining control over their own systems and information.

Trust has to work in practice

As organizations rely on services from multiple providers in distributed digital environments, trust requires practical mechanisms that make service quality and responsibilities transparent:

• Who is responsible if a service fails?
• What service levels can be expected?
• How is performance measured?
• How are responsibilities shared among multiple providers?

Clear answers to these questions give organizations the confidence to rely on services delivered across multiple providers. This is why governance is as crucial as infrastructure. Shared rules, transparent responsibilities, measurable service commitments, and clear accountability transform trust into something that organizations can rely on daily.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) illustrate this shift. Within federated environments, they become more than mere contractual documents. They establish a common understanding of service quality among multiple providers. The FACIS SLA Governance Framework Playbook was developed to support this type of coordination by translating business expectations into measurable, enforceable service commitments across complex digital ecosystems.

For organizations, these mechanisms provide something fundamental: confidence that collaboration can scale without increasing uncertainty.

From partnerships to ecosystems

One survey finding illustrates where Europe stands today. Three out of four organizations consider partnerships essential for implementing digital business models. Yet only a small proportion currently participate in orchestrated digital ecosystems where multiple organizations collaborate under shared governance, interoperable systems, and common operating principles.

This distinction matters:

• Partnerships connect individual organizations.
• Ecosystems enable many organizations to create value together.

Building those ecosystems necessitates practical governance, shared standards, interoperable interfaces, and trust mechanisms that make participation straightforward rather than resource-intensive.

Mobile roaming offers a useful comparison. Our phones move across hundreds of independent networks in Europe, while the complexity behind that experience remains largely invisible to us.

Cloud Roaming applies a similar idea to digital services. A service should be able to run across providers, infrastructures, and borders, with the infrastructure adapting as its requirements or operating conditions change. Making that possible requires independent providers to work together through common standards, shared trust, and interoperability.

This is the idea behind federation: providers remain independent – but they are no longer isolated. For organizations using these services, much of that complexity can then move into the background.

Europe’s next competitive advantage

The FACIS survey suggests that Europe has reached a significant milestone. Organizations have developed digital strategies. AI is becoming part of business planning. Infrastructure modernization is underway. Collaboration is increasingly recognized as a competitive advantage.

The next step is creating the operational foundations that allow these ambitions to scale. This entails making interoperability practical, embedding trust into everyday operations, and providing organizations with the confidence to collaborate across providers while maintaining control over their systems, data, and business decisions.

Europe’s competitiveness will increasingly depend on how effectively countless organizations leverage existing technologies in unison – securely, reliably, and at scale.

Europe has already demonstrated its digital ambition. The opportunity now lies in creating the operating models that transform that ambition into lasting business value.

Emma Wehrwein is Senior Manager Innovation & Digital Ecosystems at eco, the Internet Industry Association, and is the Project Lead at FACIS. She studied business informatics and worked for many years as a project manager in the chemical industry before joining eco. She led the BMWK-funded project to develop the first Gaia-X Federation Services now contributing to the Eclipse Foundation’s ecosystem as the XFSC Project.