How Governments Use GovStack
Governments use GovStack’s offerings to design digital public services and infrastructure for its countries citizens and businesses.
GovStack provides the standards, methods and tools to build eGovernment systems that are sovereign, sustainable, citizen-centric and interoperable – empowering governments to set national standards and collaborate on equal footing with national and international software and service providers.
Why GovStack? The value for your government
Digital sovereignty by design. GovStack’s open, vendor-neutral specifications put your government in control of its digital infrastructure. Instead of adopting a single vendor’s architecture, you define national standards based on internationally recognised specifications — and every supplier, local or international, builds to your standards. Your data, your architecture, your rules.
Freedom from vendor lock-in – and lower lifetime costs. The Building Block approach breaks monolithic systems into modular, interchangeable components with standardised interfaces. Any compliant component can be replaced without rebuilding the entire system, which keeps procurement competitive, strengthens your negotiating position, and protects past investments. Reusing shared components across ministries avoids paying for the same functionality twice.
A proven approach, backed by trusted institutions. GovStack is a multilateral initiative of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through GIZ, the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL), and the Government of Estonia — one of the world’s most advanced digital nations. Its specifications distil lessons from digital government implementations worldwide, so your teams build on tested practice rather than starting from a blank page.
Faster, citizen-centric service and architecture design. With blueprint specifications and methodological recommendation for implementation, your teams skip months of foundational design work and focus on what matters: services that work for citizens and businesses.
Visit our mission page to read more about our guiding principles.
In the following, the specific values of GovStack’s offerings is displayed using the phases:
- Prepare and plan
- Design and test
- Procure, build and operate
In practice, these phases are not sequential but iterative.
Phase 1: Prepare and Plan
Before committing budget, political capital or using specifications, government representatives need a clear picture of what GovStack offers and how it fits the national context. These resources help you build understanding, capacity and momentum at low cost and low risk.
Watch a our video introductions into the concepts of GovStack. For different skillsets of technical depth, we explain how modular Building Blocks combine into whole-of-government digital infrastructure.
Access our demo environment to explore example public services and building block implementations. Seeing real, functioning services makes the abstract concrete: it shows stakeholders what citizens would actually experience and lets technical staff evaluate the approach before any decision.
Start following our methodology for setting up and executing a digital government project – from stakeholder alignment and governance to service launch. It encodes lessons learned from implementations worldwide, helping you avoid common pitfalls and giving your project a credible, fundable roadmap from day one.
Join our trainings to build capacity and connect with other like-minded learners. These free training programmes build digital government skills inside your own administration and connect your staff with an international community of practitioners. Investing in internal capacity early reduces long-term dependence on external consultants – a direct contribution to digital sovereignty.
Phase 2: Design and Test
This is where national standards take shape. GovStack’s specifications give your architects a rigorous, internationally aligned foundation – which you adapt and extend to fit national requirements, rather than inheriting a vendor’s design choices.
Use our technical specifications to design a modular, scalable and federated eGovernment system. Re-use and extend the specification to your needs: Design the system architecture, scope and describe the software components (Building Blocks), formulate national interoperability standards and align government-wide user experience. Because the specifications are vendor-neutral, they become your national standard – every supplier must conform to it, not the other way around.
Follow our service design and testing practices to build citizen-centric service while following organisational, regulatory and domain-specific boundaries. It ensures services are tested with real users before launch, reducing the risk of expensive systems that technically work but fail citizens in practice.
Advance your design with recommendations on enterprise architecture, security, Building Block usage under specific regulations with our Implementation Guides. They are deliberately less prescriptive – recommendations on how to implement – giving your teams concrete guidance while preserving national freedom of choice.
Phase 3: Procure, Build and Operate
With standards defined, procurement becomes a competitive, transparent process: any provider – international or from your local IT industry – can bid against the same open specifications. This is where the sovereignty and cost benefits of the GovStack approach pay off most visibly.
Browse through our marketplace to identify possible software and service provider for procurements that work with GovStack specifications. It gives procurement teams a transparent starting point for market research and supplier identification.
Note: there is no obligation to use the listed software and services. You are free to use GovStack offerings with your local IT industry.
Follow our methodological recommendation to procure, build and operate public services, building blocks and its infrastructure. Well-structured procurement based on open standards is one of the most effective levers a government has for controlling long-term cost and retaining strategic control of its infrastructure.
