Harris says Sir Peter is eminently qualified to run the review but may find opportunities for savings are likewise limited in some Australian federal government departments.

"Large agencies. . . have been going down the track of trying to reduce unnecessary ICT cost for quite some time; we talk with them all the time and provide research to them for benchmarking and the like," Harris says. "That's not to say there is not more room to move, but it's becoming harder and harder now to find low-hanging fruit, which is the stuff which is being done really poorly or inefficiently.

"If you look at some of the examples in the UK, what they've been looking to do with single whole-of-country databases and the like, the picture is littered with very high expenditures for dare I say it, often ill defined or poorly defined initiatives which end up spending and wasting very large amounts of money and particularly as time goes on these things take a long time to implement and the world changes around them."

Harris said he was deeply sceptical about the potential for major savings given the history of the previous government's efforts to achieving savings in the ICT space, particularly its filed whole-of-government outsourcing program.

"So rarely are those sorts of very high level savings achieved because the costs associated with and the change management and other difficulties associated with operating in a highly centralized mode are quite significant," he says.

"On the face of it doesn't it sound like some deja vu?," he said. "'Here is a very large amount of expenditure with ICT, we must be able to take hundreds of millions out of this'. Well, you can, but many of the things are not just about buying in bigger volumes or being up the vendors harder, although there's always some scope for that; the fundamental things are generally based on policy changes, on the ability to implement projects well."

He also warned of the dangers and diseconomies which could come from too major an effort to reduce costs and consolidate, when some very large agencies, including the Taxation and Defence Departments, have already taken some strong initiatives to try and reduce cost and consolidate.

"And that's the whole point: these are large, complex initiatives and the larger you make them, the more risky they become. That's the big issue," he says.