Digitalisation plan 2027: from single projects to a roadmap

The Bitkom figures show that the situation only improves markedly at large companies. Among companies with 100 to 499 employees, one in six (17 percent) has no strategy at all; from 500 employees upwards the figure drops to 8 percent (Bitkom). The survey covered 604 companies with 20 or more employees in early 2026 (Bitkom). It reports no figures for smaller firms. For them the argument of this article applies all the more, because a handful of people carry every project at the same time.

Separate strategies are not worthless. A sales manager who digitises the quoting process and an accounts team that switches incoming invoices to a new workflow each have good reasons. The problem arises where the projects touch: both need clean customer master data, both tie up the same IT person or the same service provider, and both are due in the first quarter because summer is holiday season. Without a shared plan this conflict only becomes visible once it costs deadlines.

KfW reaches a similar conclusion from a different angle in its digitalisation report. Most mid-sized companies approach digitalisation on an ad hoc basis rather than systematically (KfW Research). At the same time activity has declined: the share of mid-sized firms with completed digitalisation projects fell by 5 percentage points to 30 percent in the survey covering 2022 to 2024 (KfW Research). KfW counts companies with an annual turnover of up to EUR 500 million as mid-sized (KfW Research). Firms that tackle fewer projects need to link those few more closely. That is exactly what an annual plan is for.

Planning starts with what is already there. Every system the firm works with gets a row: ERP, accounting, time recording, online shop, document storage, email and the spreadsheets that mediate between them. If you already have a process map, assign the systems to the workflows shown there. The row records what matters for planning, not every technical detail.

The contract column is often underestimated. Among small companies with 10 to 49 employees, 51 percent use paid cloud services; among medium-sized companies with 50 to 249 employees the figure is 65 percent (Destatis). Such services run on subscriptions with terms and notice periods. Anyone who wants to replace a system needs to know the notice date; otherwise they pay for two solutions until the next possible exit.

The end-of-support column creates dates as well. When vendor support for a version ends, security updates stop. In the reporting period of the 2025 situation report, an average of 119 new vulnerabilities became known worldwide every day, around 24 percent more than in the previous period, partly for methodological reasons (BSI). A system without updates remains exposed to that flow. The end of support therefore goes into the plan as a fixed date, with the project before it that prepares the switch. How to apply updates while operations continue is covered in the article on applying updates without downtime.

The type of projects in the Mittelstand shows how important this part is. Among mid-sized firms with digitalisation projects, renewing IT structures, meaning new hardware, new IT systems or individual new applications, accounted for 50 percent of mentions in the 2022 to 2024 period, making it the second most common project type (KfW Research). Such renewals can only be scheduled sensibly once it is clear which systems expire when.

The second lane contains the projects as bars with a start and an end. Arrows connect them wherever one project needs the result of another. These arrows are the real gain over a project list: they show which delay ripples through the year and which project should therefore get staff first. Five dependencies come up regularly in small firms.

The dependency between archive and switch-off has a legal background. Books and records must be kept for ten years, accounting vouchers for eight years (Section 147 AO). During that period, documents created digitally must be available at all times, made readable without delay and be machine-analysable (Section 147 AO). Anyone cancelling the old ERP system at year end therefore needs a tested export or an archive that meets these requirements beforehand. The migration itself is covered in the article on migrating data from a legacy system.

One dependency rarely written down is people. If two projects need the same specialist for testing, they depend on each other even if they have nothing in common technically. In the plan, such bottlenecks get their own arrow or a mark on the bar. That mark alone makes it visible when two departments are counting on the same person in the same month.

Each lane of the plan gets a responsible person, each project a project lead. In firms with 20 to 99 employees these are rarely full-time roles. The mandatory lane sensibly sits with the managing director or the head of finance, because deadlines converge there anyway. Projects are owned by the person whose department depends most on the result, not automatically by IT. The budget is kept by whoever monitors the firm's other costs.

Ownership has to match the time available. Relying on extra IT specialists is an uncertain assumption for 2027: according to the latest survey, Germany is short of 79,000 IT specialists, and 97 percent of companies with IT vacancies find it difficult to fill them (Bitkom). The plan therefore counts on the people already in the firm and on fixed allocations of external support. Whoever leads a project in a given quarter is explicitly given time for it, such as a fixed day per week, instead of carrying it on top of day-to-day work.

A written deputy rule per lane helps. If the responsible person is absent, someone else needs to know which dates are coming up and where things stand. The plan page itself is the most important tool for this, as long as it is kept current. For introducing new workflows in the departments, planned training and rollout set up as a project of its own in the plan is a good fit.

Three tools are often confused in practice, and then there is the scoping of the individual project. They complement each other but do not replace one another.

The matrix is described in the article which processes to tackle first, the scoping of individual projects in the article on process improvement without a big project. The digitalisation plan builds on both. It places the assessed and scoped projects in a year that also has to make room for mandatory dates, holidays and seasonal peaks.