IT Spending: Elections and Electronics

Information technology isn't entirely non-partisan, Shawn McCarthy, research director for IDC Government Insights, said. Administration-to-administration changes are only at the margins though and, because most IT budgeting is done in multi-year cycles, it can take a year or more for those minor shifts to show up. Federal spending on IT is projected to grow about 3 percent during fiscal 2012 after a dip of about 2 percent of actual spending during fiscal 2011, McCarthy said. Overall federal IT spending is and will remain remarkably stable despite the severe budget crunch across the rest of government, McCarthy said. That spending will continue to shift, though, from in-house systems to investments in cloud storage and other cross-agency initiatives, he said.