TechMarketView predicts government IT spending to dip in 2016 due to contract cycle
A “lack of clarity” around how the new government will procure and use IT could add to the challenges of meeting its efficiency targets, a leading market analyst has reported. In its latest survey of the public sector IT market, researcher TechMarketView comments that the lack of clarity “worsened over the summer months as key figures from the Cabinet Office, and most notably, the Government Digital Service, departed for pastures new”.
While efficiency savings are an overriding priority for the government, the report says, these will be more difficult to achieve now the low hanging fruit has been picked under the last government. More radical reform will be needed to achieve the target of £15-20bn of efficiency savings over this parliament.
"Arguably the most important, and challenging, aspect of the reform will be data," the report says. "Though we recently lost the not-long-in post Chief Data Officer in the form of Mike Bracken, data will continue to take centre stage. We will continue to see government tackling both the real and perceived barriers to data sharing whilst attempting to instil a data culture across the public sector."
This culture must reach beyond Whitehall: “We need to see a government that will ‘Join the Dots’ across central government and the wider public sector.”
Growth trajectory
TechMarketView expects spending on IT to continue on a similar growth trajectory (to 2014) in 2015, driven by shared services programmes, some contract extensions, and departments investing ICT savings in new digital initiatives. However in 2016 it will shrink, mainly because of the timing of contracts in central government, before recovering in 2017.
The report is available to subscribers at http://www.techmarketview.com/
