Government wasted billions building customized IT over last 25 years, industry group says

FedScoop: A coalition of tech companies has estimated that the federal government could have saved $345 billion over the last 25 years if it had purchased more commercial off-the-shelf solutions, rather than building systems from scratch.

The Alliance for Digital Innovation — a relatively new group reportedly founded by Amazon Web Services — reached that figure by taking the government’s average annual spending on IT, which comes to about 6.4 percent of its discretionary funding, and calculating the savings if that number were 5 percent, a figure closer to trends in the private sector.

Read article