Govt IT spend to grow 8.6% in 2022: Gartner

The government’s information technology (IT) spending is projected to reach $8.3 billion in 2022, an increase of 8.6 per cent from 2021, according to a latest forecast by research firm Gartner.

“Digitalisation initiatives of the government organisations took a giant leap in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced the government to shift priorities as supply chains and revenue streams dwindled,” said Apeksha Kaushik, senior principal research analyst at Gartner.

The central government organisations, both local and national, will increase spending on all segments of IT in 2022, except for telecom services, the company said.

The software segment is projected to achieve the highest growth of 24.7 per cent in 2022, as the adoption of citizen service delivery applications with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning will improve across citizen initiatives.

As India prepares itself for the 5G roll-out, the telecom market requires deep pockets to make an impact on innovation, quality of services to citizens, pricing. Hence, the focus on investing on telecom services will be lower as compared to the other segments in 2022.

Individual digital solutions do not correlate to overall digital maturity. As a result the overall digital maturity of the government organisations is low compared to its western counterparts. Moving from legacy systems to digital will be a major reason for the expected IT spending growth in 2022.