Government’s IT spending to rise 8.6% to $8.3 bn in 2022: Gartner

The government’s information technology 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.

“Digitalization initiatives of Indian government organizations took a giant leap in 2020 because of the global Coronavirus (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.

Indian government organizations, both local and national, will increase spending on all segments of IT in 2022, except for telecom services, the research firm said.

The software segment is forecast 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 5G rollout, 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 Indian government organizations 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.

“As vaccination rates increase throughout the country and public health improves, the governments will focus on furthering the digitalization efforts on concerns such as citizen experience and digital inclusion,” added Kaushik.

For initiatives, such as digital licensing, online judicial proceedings, digital taxation, that were initiated as a knee-jerk reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there is a still long way ahead to achieve full potential as digital inclusion is not fully met in the country, the Gartner research found.

The forthcoming 5G spectrum auction in India will be aimed at solving some of these challenges related to digital inclusion in 2022.

As cloud deployments and implementations further the digital agenda, privacy and security continue to be government CIOs’ top concerns in the country.

Key technologies that government CIOs in India will be prioritizing their spending on in 2022 will be digital workplace and business continuity solutions, business intelligence and data analytics, responsible AI and blockchain along with improved data privacy & data sharing tools.