IT Officials Spending Less On One-Time Capital Investments

Federal technology officials are aiming more budget money at operational expenditures and less at capital expenditures, according to a new study. That shift is in line with a plan that federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel has long been pushing to shift government information technology spending to a more predictable capital expenditure model, which would reduce the time and effort necessary to lobby agency heads and Congress for one-time spending.

The most common example of the shift from “cap ex” to “op ex” is the move to cloud storage for federal websites and computer systems rather than in-house data center storage. Agencies can pay for cloud storage like a utility, where cost is based on how much storage they use. This means they wouldn’t have to buy new servers every time they launched a new system...