Disclaimer: This is my personal perspective as someone working in the consortium's management. People in our task areas closer to research and development may have a different perspective.
The textbook answer would be "As part of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), the consortium aims to develop, disseminate, standardise and provide methods and services to make engineering research data FAIR: data has to be findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable."
To be a bit more colloquial, we focus on three things: (i) data literacy education and training spanning all phases of scientific careers; (ii) developing and testing a governance concept for the handling of research data (e.g., supporting a process for community-led standardisation akin to the IETF's request for comments or an engineering-focused metadata scheme); and (iii) ensuring broad availability of technologies and services for machine-actionable data and its metadata (e.g., Electronic Lab Notebooks, machine-readable test bench IDs, FAIR digital objects etc.).
You may notice that "infrastructure" in the more common sense (as in hardware, storage capacity, computing as a service etc.) is not part of our portfolio. That's simply because the funding in the NFDI intiative does not cover these items. Instead we focus on making existing resources like for example institutional repositories more visible and accessible.
In short, I see the consortium as (1) a networking agent and first stop for all interested in research data management in engineering, and (2) as developer and provider of services focused on specific problems (& methods) connected to data management in engineering research. In recent months a third goal has gained traction - representing the interests of engineering sciences towards funders and politics (i.e., "lobbying"), mostly via coordinated activities and communication together with the other funded consortia in the NFDI e.V..
