Release of Government ICT expenditure report

Today, the Special Minister of State, The Hon Gary Gray AO MP, released a report on Australian Government ICT expenditure in 2008-09 and 2009-10.  The report is now available on the Department of Finance and Deregulation website.

 The report is based on data that Finance collects from agencies as part of the annual ICT benchmarking exercise. We established the benchmarking framework in 2009, and began the benchmarking exercise officially with the 2008-09 data.   

 The report provides aggregate figures on ICT expenditure and use by agencies. It shows that the Australian Government spends about $5 billion per year, which is about 5% of the Australian ICT market, based on Australian Bureau of Statistics figures. 

Some other points worth noting are that the Applications area accounts for over a third of ICT expenditure, and that 30% of costs related to expenditure are new projects in 2009-10. It also shows up some interesting changes occurring – such as the increase in Unix-based servers between the two years.

We intend to publish the expenditure report as new data is collected. The next report with the 2010-11 data should be available in a few months.

We have also published the report data on data.gov.au, and encourage you to investigate how you can reuse and add value to the data. This is a first step in making the data available, and we would welcome your feedback and ideas on how to improve the report. Please provide any feedback to ictbenchmarking@finance.gov.au.