BENGALURU: Government IT spending globally is forecast to decline 0.6% year-on-year to $438 billion in 2020, according to research firm Gartner.
Government spending will represent 16% of total enterprise IT investment across industries, which is seen at $2.7 trillion in 2020, down 8% y-o-y.
“Government organisations are accelerating IT spending on digital public services, public health, social services, education, and workforce reskilling in support of individuals, families and businesses that are heavily impacted by the covid-19 pandemic," said Irma Fabular, senior research director at Gartner.
The Gartner report comes amid President Donald Trump’s order restricting US federal agencies from hiring foreign workers, including those on the coveted H-1B visas.
IT services will continue to be the largest IT spending segment among governments in 2020 at $152.7 billion, while software spending will experience the strongest growth, with an increase of 4.5% in 2020.
Important but less urgent IT projects, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and robotics process automation (RPA), will be delayed to make room for immediate and critical spending in digital workplace support, public health response and economic growth. "Adoption of cloud services will continue to accelerate while spending on in-house servers and storage will continue to decline," Fabular said.
Government IT spending in North America will be the largest globally, reaching $191 billion in 2020, followed by Western Europe at $94 billion and Greater China at $39 billion.
Digital government services, data and analytics, cyber security as well as citizen engagement and experience will continue to be spending targets for the public sector, Gartner said.
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