Review of ICT Infrastructure in the Public Sector in Scotland

10 Finance and Resources

There is at present no system or process for capturing completely accurate external spend data but extensive analysis of available information from an "improvisation based" application leads to the conclusion that in 2008/9 nearly £900m was spent with suppliers of ICT related services and goods. Although some 2009/10 data is available it is not 100% complete.

Similarly there is no central record of numbers of ICT staff but this review concludes that there are at least 6200 people involved in ICT across the whole public sector and that it operates more than 120 data centres or data processing facilities ¹³ .

If that staffing level assumption and its cost is taken along with the costs of facilities and support and the external spend referred to above then it can be concluded that the public sector invested in fiscal year 2008/9 approximately £1.4bn ¹⁴ .

Pending the commentary offered later in this report in section 13: Savings Opportunities it is asserted that the mode in which ICT is deployed and operated, with its fragmentation and duplication of resources and its unstructured external spend, cannot possibly deliver optimum levels of cost. Also the fact that more than 60% of total ICT expenditure comes from external spend with the industry points to a major dependency upon how the public sector structures its ICT procurement.