Insane government £wastage

phil_b_2

As a web developer myself, I looked at this one and thought there must be a typo, the numbers are mind-boggling to the extreme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/07/the_105m_website.html

The site in the spotlight is Business link (http://www.businesslink.gov.uk):

The correspondent said this site, run by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), had cost £35m a year to build and operate for three years and suggested that it had been poor value, delivered an unsatisfactory service to users and proved technically shaky.

The COI report has some detail - £6.2m on strategy and planning, £4.4m on design and build, £4.7m on hosting and infrastructure, £15.3m on content provision and £4.5m on testing and evaluation.

£4.4m on design and build???!?! The site build is pretty straight-forward stuff. I cant imagine the CMS being overly elaborate. It's The sort of thing a competent freelancer might quote a few grand for as a ball-park...

£4.7m on hosting and infrastructure?!?!?! Is it being hosted on the moon?

The government bods really are all in it together. Heaping money onto each other and somehow justifying it.

Sir_Humphrey

You have to actually put content on the sites. Business link is intended to replace individual webistes across Whitehall. It is a vast website.

This is not like producing a Flash site for a record label.

Graham_Devon

Although they have split it into nice little chunks, it actually equates to:

£50m costs, £55m beauracracy.

Probably.

Once it's up and running, they will probably re-brand it at the cost of £20m, and start again.

phil_b_2

Sir_Humphrey wrote: »

This is not like producing a Flash site for a record label.

Wow really?.. Well thanks for clearing that up...

Those costs cant be justified. Any attempt to do so is laughable. I know there is a lot of content on the site but it boils down to a relatively simple 3-4 tier site. The build and hosting costs are otherworldy.
I even think the content provision cost is rediculous. I'm sure this isn't a unique case.

carolt

How much of that was on consultants?

ILW

When I used to sell certain products and services, most state bodies we sold to ended up paying at least twice what the private companies did. They never negotiated and once you got onto some of the preferred supplier lists, you could charge whatever you liked. Hopefully it is all being sorted now and a few of the purchasing and managers should be fired for gross incompetence.

lewisa

I run a small internet firm, and if I had at launch even a 10th of the budget of some of these projects, Id be the owner of several million pound etail business' by now.

Reminds of the group of Birmingham Uni students who took 2 days to write an online Council Tax payment system and gave it to the council, who obviously used the one provided by Capita instead, which cost millions and didnt even work.

Governments should stick to starting wars, spying on citizens and speeding fines, thats all they seem to be good at.

Sir_Humphrey wrote: »

You have to actually put content on the sites. Business link is intended to replace individual webistes across Whitehall. It is a vast website.

This is not like producing a Flash site for a record label.

That is way, way out of the sphere of realistic budgeting.

BBC Online budget is only just over £110 million(admittedly with a current shortfall) for one of the biggest sites in the world in terms of users served and content offered.

Cant see a case for Business Link getting anywhere near a 3rd of the content or users that BBC online has to deal with.



Id love to see what BBC Online Infrastructure and hosting costs are to compare to Bus.Link but cant find the data.

Sir_Humphrey

lewisa wrote: »

That is way, way out of the sphere of realistic budgeting.

BBC Online budget is only just over £110 million(admittedly with a current shortfall) for one of the biggest sites in the world in terms of users served and content offered.

Cant see a case for Business Link getting anywhere near a 3rd of the content or users that BBC online has to deal with.

You think? I don't think you actually know what Business Link is.

You also do not realise that this replaces hundreds of other govt websites.

phil_b_2

Sir_Humphrey wrote: »

You also do not realise that this replaces hundreds of other govt websites.

So does that mean that most of the content on the site has just been ripped from existing sites, reworded and pasted? Even worse.

It is all text-based content. Not really and audio, video or imagery to speak of. No complex editing, mastering or technology considerations required either.

Mr_Mumble

The website only has 50,000 unique visitors in a good month. Amazon's S3 costs 15 cents per gigabyte. Using the S3 cost calculator and assuming very generous bandwidth usages (25MB per visitor i.e. assuming each visitor averages around a dozen bulky PDF downloads) its hard to see how the monthly bandwidth fee could be more than £150 per month. A dedicated server would cost no more than £100 per month for this kind of site. How the frack do they spend £4.7m?!

Sir_Humphrey

phil_b wrote: »

So does that mean that most of the content on the site has just been ripped from existing sites, reworded and pasted? Even worse.

I have not had involvement with Business Link personally, although I know some people in my division have.

It did involve more than that. However, if there has been leakage anywhere, it certainly has not been to rank and file civil servants.