Banks spend £10k per user on IT

Financial services companies are bucking the trend and spending a whopping £10,000 on IT per end user each year.

The typical company will spend around £3,891 per end user, while the finance sector reported the highest level of spending with £9,864 being spent per end user.

The typical company will also employ 28.1 techies per 1,000 end users, while finance companies employ 75 IT staff per 1,000 end users.

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Stefan Foster, managing director of the National Computing Centre, which conducted the survey, said that with online security a significant issue for the finance sector, it was no surprise to see they are spending more than the average.

Other high-spending sectors included other services, transport and utilities, and business services, according to the NCC survey of 205 organisations.

The lowest-spending sectors included local government and health at £2,189 and £1,713 per end user respectively. But the NCC said that both of these sectors have benefited from heavy investment in previous years and appear to be exploiting this investment.

A typical company will spend around 2.5 per cent of their turnover on IT, which the NCC said indicates a continued period of steady but modest investment.

Just over half (58 per cent) of respondents expect their total IT expenditure to increase in the next two years - although central government IT chiefs are expecting spending to fall.

Nearly two-thirds of corporate desktops are running Windows XP and a third of the respondents to the survey expect to have some Windows Vista desktop systems in two years' time. The NCC said if all their expectations were realised, Vista would be installed on 12 per cent of the desktop population by 2008.