ICT Facts and Figures

 ICT Facts and Figures 

The ITU ICT Facts and Figures – The world in 2015 features end-2015 estimates for key telecommunication/ICT indicators, including on mobile-cellular subscriptions, Internet use, fixed and mobile broadband services, home ICT access, and more. 2015 is the deadline for achievements of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which global leaders agreed upon in the year 2000, and the new data show ICT progress and highlight remaining gaps.

The phrase "information and communication technology" has been used by academic researchers since the 1980s, and the abbreviation ICT became popular after it was used in a report to the UK government by Dennis Stevenson in 1997, and in the revised National Curriculum for England, Wales and Northern Ireland in 2000. But in 2012, the Royal Society recommended that ICT should no longer be used in British schools "as it has attracted too many negative connotations", and with this being in effect since 2014 the National Curriculum began to utilize the word computing, which reflects the addition of computer programming into the curriculum. A leading group of universities consider ICT to be a soft subject and thus advise students against studying A-level ICT, preferring A-level Computer Science instead.

Monetization of ICT

The money spent on IT worldwide has been most recently estimated as US $3.5 trillion and is currently growing at 6% per year – doubling every 15 years. The 2014 IT budget of US federal government is nearly $82 billion. IT costs, as a percentage of corporate revenue, have grown 50% since 2002, putting a strain on IT budgets. When looking at current companies’ IT budgets, 75% are recurrent costs, used to “keep the lights on” in the IT department, and 25% are cost of new initiatives for technology development.

The average IT budget has the following breakdown:

31% personnel costs (internal)

29% software costs (external/purchasing category)

26% hardware costs (external/purchasing category)

14% costs of external service providers (external/services).