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Sustaining Cost Savings in Government IT

By aligning resources across departmental lines, government IT leaders can cut costs by up to 30 percent.

By aligning and sharing resources across departmental lines, government IT leaders can uncover cost-cutting opportunities of as much as 30 percent.

The U.S. government IT spending landscape is extraordinarily complex-not surprising for an enterprise with dozens of departments and more than two million employees. However, in our experience we have seen that organizational spending for even the most common IT computing commodities can be excessively complicated. For example, some individual departments use more than 50 models of hardware, connected by sprawling networks-even though the vast majority of their employees only need Internet, email and office software to do their jobs.

This excess IT spending represents a major cost-cutting opportunity for the federal government-perhaps as much as 30 percent. For example, using shared and cloud-based resources and optimizing the use of hardware are just a few ways government organizations could reduce spending significantly without compromising business and mission needs. Put simply, it’s taking out cost without diminishing what’s being done.

Clearly, this mission is not just about cost cutting-the longer-term benefit to government would be in developing an approach that transforms the way IT spending is done, so that the changes made now have a lasting effect on the enterprise. To make this happen, government IT leaders must adopt a new model that aligns and shares resources across departmental lines.