The U.S. government can save more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years by consolidating its IT infrastructure, reducing its energy use, and moving to more Web-based citizen services, a group of tech CEOs said in a report released Wednesday.
The Technology CEO Council’s report, delivered to President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also recommends that the U.S. government streamline its supply chains and move agencies to shared services for mission-support activities.
In June, the U.S. Department of Treasury predicted the U.S. government’s budget deficit would reach $19.6 trillion by 2015. The current government debt is more than $13 trillion.
The federal government can achieve large savings by consolidating its IT resources, the report said. The government now spends about $76 billion a year to support “widely dispersed” IT assets, the report said.
“The government’s costs of operating information technology systems are higher than they need to be — in some cases by more than a factor of two,” the report said.
Council member IBM cut its IT expenses in half over the past five years through consolidation and standardization, the report said. EMC, another member, has saved more than $100 million over the past five years through virtualization, the report added.
The federal government could also reduce IT energy consumption by 25%, and it could save $200 billion over 10 years by using advanced analytics to stop improper payments, the report said.
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