News item | 04-07-2025 | 15:15
The cabinet is launching a Dutch digitization strategy (NDS) under the motto: speeding up together is the only option. This strategy is a joint digitization strategy of municipalities, provinces, water boards, public service providers and the government to strengthen the digital basis of our country and to tackle social challenges. In an increasingly digitizing world, this cooperation between governments is essential for a resilient society and a strong economy.
Focus in approach
Digitization presents us for urgent issues, such as fragmentation in IT policy, innovation, a shortage of digital professionals and the geopolitical need to be less dependent on foreign technology providers. With the NDS, the Netherlands focuses on direction, cooperation, resilience and a future -oriented approach.
State Secretary for Marum of the Interior and Kingdom Relations: “The NDS is an important milestone. The necessity and urgency to accelerate as one government in the digital world is widely shared. We cannot afford to work as separate organizations. I am now very grateful to the provinces, municipalities and commiters. Society.
The NDS emphasizes six priorities on which all government organizations accelerate as one government together. These are:
- We use cloud technology together.
We are working on exploring the realization of a government -wide sovereign cloud service in collaboration with existing government service providers and the market. We strive for a central government market for cloud technologies that links demand for the right offer. We do this on the basis of standards and European experiences. The deployment is to no longer place data and services that are essential in the public cloud. - We share and use data in a responsible way over government layers.
We do this by working data -wide data -driven through the federative data system with binding agreements and standards. Domain -specific appointment systems are in line with this. We are working on a government -wide system to raise data bottlenecks that organizations encounter, to resolve them collectively and to prevent future bottlenecks. - We use the opportunities of AI in a responsible way.
We use this technology to solve social problems and improve services to citizens. We do this by taking control through one leading approach, making successful applications usable for the entire government and by removing obstacles for innovation. We strive for a high-quality AI infrastructure that the government also uses, including high quality data, open language models from the Netherlands and/or the EU, the training and retention of available talent and sufficient computing power. - We focus on citizens and entrepreneurs.
There are already many activities on this theme, also outside the digitization domain. With these NDS we contribute to the focus of citizens and entrepreneurs by applying a number of gears. For example, citizens and entrepreneurs must experience contact and interaction from one government. The starting point is: ‘Always the right door’. Citizens and entrepreneurs receive (information about) public services and products proactively provided and offered. The service experience of citizens and entrepreneurs is central. - We strengthen digital resilience and digital autonomy of the government.
There is one government -wide approach for digital resilience and digital autonomy, including a number of collective solutions. We increase our own independence when it comes to digital technology and ensure that we are less dependent on a too limited number of suppliers. We strengthen the stability of the government by continuously improving our digital resilience. With crises we ensure fast and effective recovery, so that disruptions do not cause long -term damage. Exercises are important here and we do this as one government. There is a government -wide approach on quantum -proof cryptography and, in collaboration with the market, all government organizations are prepared to control the risks. - We strengthen digital craftsmanship of civil servants and have a modern working environment.
Organizations will work data -driven. The skills and working environment of civil servants must connect to this. We determine a personnel strategy for digitization with which we determine which knowledge we need and which we get from the market. This allows us to recruit, retrain and develop education on the basis of technological innovations. We take control of the development of digitization knowledge of civil servants and ensure scaling up and cohesion of central pools for digitization professionals. ICT knowledge is actively shared and used more efficiently. We strive for a modern digital working environment with which the civil servant is equipped with the right resources to effectively carry out his or her work.
Better digital future for everyone
The Dutch digitization strategy underlines that cooperation is essential to come to breakthroughs. A next step is to map the required investments to realize a powerful digital government, which works for all Dutch people. Parallel to this, all government layers are started with the implementation of the strategy.