In accordance with the IT State Treaty, the IT Planning Council coordinates cooperation between the federal and state governments on information technology issues and manages projects relating to government and administration supported by information and communication technology (eGovernment). The e-government projects are based on the National E-Government Strategy (NEGS), which was adopted by the IT Planning Council and updated in 2015. The NEGS is a political guideline jointly developed and pursued by the federal, state and local governments to further develop eGovernment and the information technology of administrations and, in particular, to strengthen the aspect of a federal division of labor and interdisciplinary cooperation.
Applications are IT solutions that have emerged from projects or project-like structures of the IT Planning Council and are now shared, permanently operated and further developed.
Accordingly, an application is said to exist when an e-government solution is used on a regular basis to support processes in public administration after a corresponding design, development and test phase.
In addition, the federal and state governments agree that Germany's administration should become a role model in digitization. This is only possible if new strategies for the use of appropriate IT solutions are developed jointly by all federal levels. This requires flexible but also constant cooperation that keeps pace with the speed of digitization.
For this reason, the IT Planning Council has established a small, agile organization that combines the relevant competencies and resources: FITKO (Federal IT Cooperation), headed by Dr. Schmidt and based in Frankfurt am Main. Its sponsors are all the federal states and the federal government.