The £105m Website

[HuskyPup]

What would it cost to create and run a government website for three years?

Incredible, anyone here creaming this?

[bbc.co.uk...]

[mack]

Trying to figure out where they get those amounts from, red tape is an expensive commodity. All those meetings to decide what to talk about at meetings, then audits to decide what needs to be audited. and thats before they have board meetings to decide who should do what, then theres compliance.

Good to see tax payers money being spent well.

Mack.

[engine]

That is a massive amount of money for a site.

I once worked (subcontract) for a Government funded operation (not Internet-releted).

I remember the chief executive saying to me something along the lines of, "...we need to be seen to be doing something, even if we are not. Please write a report."

That tripped off his tongue too easily, for my liking and I stopped doing the subcontract work.

[blend27]

I've seen some of the Gov internal Intranet projects in the past...

10 outsourced inhouse Consultants X $150/hr X 7 Hours/Daily X 250 Working Days per Year = $2625000

And these are just consultants, all thought entire project could have been done by 5 consultants in the same time span, then add what mack said to it.

BUT when it was done it saved the GOV close to 30 Million Beans a year by catching cheaters of the system.

[HuskyPup]

BUT when it was done it saved the GOV close to 30 Million Beans a year by catching cheaters of the system.

But this isn't a site trying to find cheaters, it's a one million visitors a month site ostensibly sourcing business information.

There are many, many webmasters here with sites serving more than 1 million visitors per month for a mere pittance compared to their expenditures.

I have a friend who unfortunately works for Serco, the stories he's been telling me for years of wasted government funding/broken contracts/botched jobs are quite incredulous.

[caribguy]

Back in the 90's I've been part of the dev team that built the first national gov portal for a country. We routinely also did projects for smaller entities.

The price of such projects included all of the factors already mentioned by mack, engine and blend27, plus the cost of our overpaid and clueless account managers who were involved in the bidding process, a good amount of padding (say 50%) because of the contract being fixed price or fixed budget, complete functional and technical specification of the system, training of the people who would be doing day to day maintenance and updates, hosting with fail safe requirements, and maintenance.

Needless to say, I'm not surprised.

[vik_c]

No wonder the Queen is going bankrupt :)

[lammert]

£4.7m on hosting and infrastructure

That is quite an amount of money per year for serving a million uniques per month. Even if these are resource intensive visits, 10% of this sum would still be enough for a truckload of servers, firewalls and peripherals.

[kaled]

The website replaced a bricks and mortar operation. The huge cost will doubtless be slightly smaller than the previous cost but may also have absorbed monies raised from the sale of buildings (if any were owned rather than leased). In other words, a huge amount of money was available and was used.

The term "gravy train" springs to mind. I remember when the Millennium Dome was being built - I knew someone who managed to land an IT consultancy gig at £500 per half day i.e. he showed his face for a couple of hours a day, drank coffee and chatted with other people on similar monies and got paid £2,500 per week for nothing useful whatsoever. To be fair, he's a fairly clever guy, he could have contributed but in the vastness of it all, there was nothing to do.

Kaled.

[londrum]

half of that is probably expenses, remember. they've got to pay for their taxi fares and tea and biscuits