As structured, the Action Plan for the Digital Decade risks promoting siloed approaches.
The Association of Finnish Cities and Municipalities shares this view. It expressed it in response to a public consultation recently organized by the European Commission, with the aim of reviewing the programme by no later than 30 June 2026.
A little over a hundred responses were received. Here we discuss a few of them that propose adding, removing, or reshaping objectives and/or associated indicators across the four “cardinal points” of the programme: infrastructures, skills, digitization of public services, and the digital transformation of businesses.
1 – On Infrastructure
The Czech government recommends that indicators relating to connectivity take into account geographic and economic realities. The Politecnico di Milano does the same. It favors a universal “reach” indicator that is independent of the technology mix.
Do not skip indoor connectivity
On the side of the Wi‑Fi Alliance, there is a call to include a measurement of indoor Wi‑Fi performance. The same goes for the professional association FTTH Council Europe, which also pushes for indicators of the sunset of copper networks.
Think about network resilience…
Europacable (association of European wire and cable manufacturers) invites including indicators on network resilience: redundancy, failure rate, restoration times.
… and for consumers
Following BEUC (European Bureau of Consumer Organisations) and ecta (association of “alternative” telecom operators), there is a wish to see indicators on the variety of commercial offers. It also asks to monitor the average price of the most popular offers, year after year, comparing with the United States, Japan and South Korea.
Demonstrating the easing of the administrative burden
ecta also promotes indicators specific to autonomous 5G. And others reflecting the actual easing of the administrative burden: the ability to sell digital services across the EU, the commissioning time for datacenters, submarine cables, and FTTH networks.
The EWIA (TowerCo professional association) shares the same sentiment. It calls for indicators covering permitting procedures (time from application to grant) as well as the availability of land and public buildings for deploying electronic communications infrastructure. For the CISPE (cloud providers association), it suggests the objective of halving permitting times for datacenters and grid connections between 2020 and 2030.
Better measuring dependencies
The Associazione Italiana Internet Provider (the main Italian ISP association) centers its contribution on sovereignty. It deems the current objectives too generic to reflect dependence on non-European clouds. It argues that the share of workloads processed by European actors and the proportion of datacenters they control should be assessed. Another point: the target of 10,000 climate-neutral edge nodes no longer aligns with market and territorial needs, given the energy consumption of AI and the concentration of capacities in the hands of a few providers.
Measuring Europe’s AI capacity
Cisco would like the Digital Decade Programme to measure whether Europe can deploy AI workloads at scale. To this end, it suggests indicators reflecting, for example, the share of computing resources that are optimized.
2 – On Skills
One of the objectives of the Digital Decade Programme is to develop basic digital skills in 80% of people aged 16 to 74.
Tracking employability rate
The AMETIC (Spanish IT sector association) recommends keeping this target, alongside the objective of training 20 million ICT specialists. But it advises adding a “quality” lens (employment rate 6 and 12 months after training) and an “equity” lens (rates of women and of people over 45).
Be more explicit about AI and cyber
All Digital (network of digital-skills centers) calls for a more fine-grained assessment of the “80%” criterion by age bands. It also invites integrating AI and cyber dimensions, as well as digital well-being, more explicitly.
The FTTH Council Europe, for its part, urges raising the objective to 100%. Rationale: consistency with the aim of digitizing 100% of essential public services.
Measuring knowledge of European stacks
The Gesellschaft für Informatik (German computer science association) supports the goal of training 20 million professionals. It would like at least 60% of these professionals to have advanced expertise in European or open-source stacks. And that the same share of companies develop internal capabilities in digital sovereignty, for example with positions like Chief Sovereignty Officer.
Relaxing the definition of “ICT professional”
The Italian Council Presidency believes, echoing the Politecnico di Milano, that data should be collected annually, not every two years. It also advocates a looser definition of “ICT professionals” so that hybrid or in-training workers are not excluded.
Focusing on open-source certifications
The Polish Economic Institute would like the share of these professionals certified on open-source systems to be calculated. The ISC2 (International Information System Security Certification Consortium) calls for an objective of 300,000 additional cybersecurity professionals trained by 2030.
Training that increases dependencies
The European DIGITAL SME Alliance focuses on training. It regrets that trainings are mostly on non-European platforms and prepare for technologies that are largely non-European.
3 – On the digitization of public services
The European DIGITAL SME Alliance also weighs in on the digitization of public services. It wants, by 2030, 60% of the value of public procurement to go to European suppliers. The Gesellschaft für Informatik goes further, setting the target at 70%. The Associazione Italiana Internet Provider proposes milestones: 20% in 2028, 50% in 2031, 100% in 2035.
Prioritizing accessibility
The CERMI CV (civil-society representative association in the Valencian Community, Spain) suggests moving from a logic of service availability to accessibility. It wants 100% of essential services (“health, justice, administration, education”) to comply with EN 301459 by 2030.
The Politecnico di Milano also wants more granular data on the digitization of justice and education. It recommends moving from a mystery-shopper evaluation to large-scale administrative data collection or user surveys.
Detailing objectives at the local level…
The VNG (association of Dutch municipalities) would like the EU to structure programme objectives by level of administration. Responsibilities could then be clarified and local authorities’ contributions encouraged.
… and sovereignty as well
The Polish Economic Institute calls for measuring sovereignty at the local level, annually in a different sector. On health, it urges moving beyond data availability to assess the deployment of predictive tools within a preventive medicine perspective.
4 – On the digital transformation of businesses
One of the programme’s objectives is to have 75% of companies using cloud, AI, or big data.
Giving a place to multicloud
The Open Cloud Coalition finds the current formulation imprecise. It argues that there should be a measure of multicloud capability and, with that, the extent of vendor lock-in.
The CISPE also wants a more precise indicator: for example, at least 75% of workloads in the cloud. And at least 50% on sovereign infrastructures and services. As well as at least 90% of small and medium-sized enterprises using basic cloud services (email, storage, collaboration).
Tracking unicorns from birth to exit
Following its proposal on the share of European suppliers in public procurement, the Gesellschaft für Informatik would like at least 60% of a company’s cloud usage to rely on European or open-source platforms. It also suggests measuring the rate of unicorns born on European stacks.
The Polish Economic Institute suggests examining the rate of start-ups and scale-ups that exit in Europe. It sees this indicator as more meaningful than the goal of doubling the number of unicorns to demonstrate a favorable environment for innovation.
Assessing cyber maturity in deploying “modern” architectures
The programme’s objectives were defined before the GenAI wave, notes CrowdStrike. The publisher calls for updating them… to enshrine AI-assisted security as a core element of the digital ecosystem. To make measurable the goal of basic cyber maturity in public and private organizations, it recommends assessing the adoption of “modern” architectures (zero trust, MDR…) and the deployment of cross-border SOCs, while including sub-goals: EDR coverage, deployment of next-gen SIEM, continuous threat intelligence across critical sectors, etc.
