One of the key recommendations was to save $100 million each year by slashing 50 per cent of the expensive contracters and replacing them with public servants. Finance has also identified the growing influence of IT on federal departments, despite the service enjoying some success in reining in its tech costs, as recommonded by Gershon in 2008. Elsewhere department's report finds the public service's IT crowd getting bigger, better paid, and controlling larger chunks of their departmental budgets. Australian Public Servants get better tech support, on paper at least, than bureaucrat anywhere else in the developed world with one IT worker for every nine public servants. There were 13,300 full-timers working in information technology departments and projects in 2013-14, according to the latest report on Australian Government ICT trends, and three quarters of them were at the well-paid APS 6 pay scale or above.

The numbers are down from their peak of 14,200 two years previously but the ranks of techies are growing as a proportion of the workforce, and as a long term-trend with just 12,500 IT professionals on the public service's books in 2008-09. The department's report shows Australian public servants get better tech support, on paper at least, than bureaucrats anywhere else in the developed world, with one IT worker for every nine Australian public servants. The international norm is 1 techie supporting between 11 and 15 rank-and-file public servants. Although both IT and overall departmental spending has been slashed since 2008-09, ICT expenditure has grown as a proportion of total reported agency expenditure from 8.4 per cent to 9.6 per cent over the same time period. The public service spent $5.2 billion on ICT in 2014-15, according to Finance.