Rebuilding the engine while it runs

What digital transformation means in a large organisation

In a start-up, “digital” is simply how the business is built. In an established company or a state administration, it means changing products, processes, technology and culture at the same time — without interrupting services that millions of people depend on every day. The difficulty is less the technology itself than the number of existing systems, rules and habits that have to change together.

The legacy problem

Large organisations typically run on systems built decades apart: billing platforms, customer databases, branch systems, specialist applications. Each works on its own, but connecting them is expensive and risky. Energy companies inherited separate systems for every acquired utility; retailers ran separate country organisations; German public administration is spread across federal, state and municipal levels with thousands of separate procedures.

One common approach is to build a shared platform layer — common standards and reusable components — rather than replacing everything at once. The federal “Deutschland-Stack”, for which the ministry opened a consultation in October 2025, is an example: a sovereign, interoperable IT platform for federal, state and municipal government.

Customer expectations

Citizens and customers compare every service with the best apps they use. Energy customers expect to see consumption in real time; retail customers expect to order online and collect in store — a CIO.de report in 2024 said 38% of MediaMarktSaturn customers picked up online orders in store. Citizens expect to change their address or register a business online.

Data, automation and AI

Digital services depend on data that can flow between systems. The “once-only” principle — submitting information to authorities only once — needs connected registers; the cabinet adopted the basis for it in May 2025, and the federal–state NOOTS treaty followed. Automation and AI then build on that data. The ministry reports that AI tools have cut processing effort for complex infrastructure permits, figures that are the government's own.

Organisational change and leadership

Studies of transformation consistently identify leadership, skills and decision-making structures as decisive. In government, this includes budget control: the BMDS was given an approval right over essential IT spending of the direct federal administration — a central steering lever for federal IT.

How this connects to Wildberger's experience

Energy: at E.ON he held board responsibility for digital transformation and IT as well as the customer business, during the integration of innogy's retail customers.

Retail: at Ceconomy he described the change as moving from “product-centric” retail towards a “customer-centric service platform”.

State: as minister he describes the ministry itself in start-up terms — his speech at re:publica 2025 was titled “Digitalministerium als Start-up” (the digital ministry as a start-up).

“It's not about more state. It's about a state that can do more.”

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