One of the great things about living in the social media age is the plethora of blogs focusing on very specific parts of government policy and spending.

Paul Ramsey (NOT the former NDP MLA of the same name) is a great example. Ramsey is a computers guy, and offers compelling, interesting analysis of how the BC Government spends its billions on Information Technology (spoiler alert: not well).

His latest post, found HERE, breaks down the 2015-16 government public accounts. The full post is well worth a read.

For example, he reports that government spending on outside IT contractors fell last year – but not really. It seems a lot of it just got shunted into various government agencies, such as provincial health authorities.

Here’s his main conclusion:

The moral of the story, I think, is: if you have money, you will spend money.

• As part of my research, I reviewed the school district financials and found very minimal spending on IT consulting: not enough to warrant the effort to enter all the data. School districts are just too poor to waste money on stupid IT consulting.
• On the flip side, I reviewed the ICBC 2015 list of vendors and found, in just one year, spending of:
• $5,051,887 on Accenture
• $23,944,563 on IBM
• $3,177,241 on HP Advanced Solutions
• $7,962,866 on Deloitte, and
• $5,962,057 on Quartech Systems.

On administrative operating costs of about $350M, that’s $46M of IT spend, over 18%. If you’ve got money, you’ll find a way to spend it.