Comments on: New data reveals gov web spend, usage & satisfaction

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:35:26 +0000

Alan - yes I'm sure that's wishful thinking on my part!
The reason I mentioned it is that the _really_ big ticket items such as http://tinyurl.com/22pr5sj (to name but one) are often not even visible to the public, and doing these better is where the real savings are to be made.
Whenever a 'website' is actually part of some much bigger process/platform then a 'cost of website' figure is not that informative - what's really required is a meaningful analysis of costs and benefits. Doing that would not be easy or cheap and it seems that most journalists, commentators and even ministers aren't that interested in (or capable of understanding) anything more than headline figures.

By: Alan Mather

Alan Mather — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:18:34 +0000

Agree with Matt that a breakdown of total IT spend would be interesting and something that has long been sought after. The questionnaires are now out there. I see people every day struggling with how to get at how much any given department spends on software, or servers or networks because their invoices are often not broken down like that. If you thought reconciling COINS was hard, the IT spend break down is going to be even harder.

By: Alan Mather

Alan Mather — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:16:54 +0000

Can't tell you how pleased I am that my place in the egov blog world has been taken over by people who actually know what they're talking about. I do want to give credit, though, to my friend John Gotze who was the first to blog on egov, several months before me (sometime in 2001)

By: Matt

Matt — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 01:56:39 +0000

The figures, though interesting, are so wildly out of kilter with each other that I can't help but feel each dept. is reporting very different things. For instance I note that the FCO's staff number is 'not feasible' to calculate, and the other costs don't seem to tally with http://tinyurl.com/2dawc8v.

Based on those departments I know, I'm pretty sure that hosting figure includes a multitude of sins, and staff (it's not what I'd call plain 'hosting' cost as you might pay to a hosting company). Not sure I believe all the 'strategy and planning, £0; testing and evaluation, £0's, either - even though it feels that way sometimes. Quite a few 'content provision, £0's' too. So to me, the whole thing fails a sanity test.

A breakdown of total IT spend per dept. would be an interesting one. So would office furniture

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:07:08 +0000

Can't tell you how excited I am to have a comment - in fact, two! - from Alan Mather. (For those who don't know Alan, there was a time when he was the e-gov blogosphere.) Of course you're right Alan. On one level, we've known the worst of these figures for some time. And on the other, the new data probably isn't directly comparable. Not yet. You have to assume this is the start of a process.

By: Alan Mather

Alan Mather — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:26:11 +0000

See this from 2003 on the BBC site

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2910951.stm

By: Alan Mather

Alan Mather — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:16:27 +0000

This information has been collected pretty much every year since 2001 or so, via a parliamentary round robin question. I used to use it as the source for regular reports I put across government on how little we knew about how many websites we had and how much they cost. This is the first time, though, I've seen it presented in such a comprehensive way (they've got far more data than the PQs ever surfaced which is good thing)

The problems with the cost numbers is that departments with an outsource contract don't pay per website or even per server - costs will be allocated in all kinds of odd ways. So you're right, the hosting numbers are certainly wrong - and probably by a factor of 100% or even 200% at a guess

As Matt says in the previous comment, the other numbers will have different methodologies too - but with reports like this, the COI will drive the standardisation of approach that will ensure apples to apples.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:13:26 +0000

Completely agree that each department will be counting different things in its numbers (hosting, internal staff, contract staff, tendered work), will almost certainly be counting 'visitors' differently and will be surveying differently. I have seen it happen in govt. a number of times. On top of that, there's no analysis of what it would cost to not have each website (enquiry units, paper pushing etc) - which would be pretty hard to measure anyway (so - er let's not bother, eh ?) Particularly when a website offers an online service (say, tax returns for example), it's not useful to think of it as a 'website', but as a service provision. How much, for instance, would it cost to process X million paper tax returns ?? I'm going to hazard a guess that it's cheaper online. I'm in full agreement on the 'super sites' too. There's a happy medium to be reached somewhere between a mess of micro sites vs a few overly bloated monsters...