Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't To Review Hundreds of Websites, Axe Many of Them
krou writes "The UK government is to review all of its 820 websites after the Central Office of Information revealed that for 2009-2010, the government spent '£94m on website development and running costs and £32m on web staff,' which each site visitor representing a cost of £11.78 to the government. 'The UK Trade and Investment website averaged 28,000 users per month but cost over £4m ... 16% of government departments did not know how their own websites were being used by tax payers, and almost a quarter were not aware of the running costs.' There was also anecdotal evidence of departments bidding against each other for search terms on Google. The review is to be carried out by Cabinet Minister Francis Maude, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander, and Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox."
I'm not sure what this has to do with my rights online. This pertains to an internal governmental review of *its own* websites, not other people's.
The UK needs to study economics instead of pop economics.
As a web designer / developer I am always bewildered by the obscene costs I hear for government websites, especially given their terribly below level of quality and usefulness.
People with government contracts must really milk it for all it's worth.
As a Google advertiser, I've yet to find a way to prevent bidding against any other specific site.
I don't believe Google allows that level of detail. I'm also not aware that you even know the other bidders.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
As the architect of one of these websites, I hope they leave mine alone. It's not bothering anyone... minding it's own business.. serving the folks.. doing good.
I'm a pretty good web dev, where can I get me some of that 32 million pounds!
Is £11.78 inherently too much to spend for a web site visitor? When I need to renew my vehicle registration, a web site visit that let's me do it online is certainly worth more than that to me rather than spending half a day at the DMV. For some business-oriented sites that deal with licenses, £11.78 per visitor could certainly be worth bringing in a few more £1,000,000 per year businesses to town.
This 'revelation' is simply another illustration of how bureaucracy works.
No one should be surprised to find competing layers of effort, working from silos, oblivious to duplication of effort when they look at this.
It's a symptom, not the issue. It's how govt. works.
Good luck making any effective changes at the delivery level...
I regret to inform you, that the UK government has recently begun conducting a review of 820 websites, and your web site is to be terminated immediately, due to excessive costs to the taxpayers.
The UK Central Office of Information recently revealed the high cost per visitor of £11.78 to our websites.
Your recent article linked to the BBC, making your web site part of ours. The BBC.CO.UK received nearly 100 million page views, referred by the slashdot.org page, costing the taxpayer £1 billion.
Therefore the Central Information Office has issued an order that slashdot.org be shut down immediately, as a cost saving measure. Please comply, or the ramifications could be dire.
nice girl and all, but you sure this is the person to fix any of this?
Seriously if they are doing £12 per visitor, it really makes me wonder how much they pay for physical office space per visitor. Since it is the government there is probably a building or office that relates the physical presence of each one of these websites. If overall traffic to the websites are that low just imagine how much is wasted as foot traffic is probably significantly less.
Posting AC, naturally.*
We need to stop outsourcing our IT. Now. Have you ever tried looking for something on direct.gov.uk? Only local council sites are worse, though that's to be expected.**
*We're not allowed to express political opinions in an official capacity, I'm not a press officer.
**Snobbery, perhaps, but people bitch about the government when it comes to the police, bins, etc. when frankly it's not the Service's fault. Those guys seem to do their very best to be king of their own hill...
From personal experience:
A media (video, web) company I used to work for would double (or more) their rates when bidding on a government contract and still be the lowest bidder by a mile. They wouldn't even take us seriously if we bid what we usually charged.
Of course, we did good work. There were some high-six-figures to low-seven-figures contracts paid out for a product that was so shiatty I'd have said they'd been ripped off if they'd paid even $20,000. There are businesses finding a niche, getting to know the right people, and then half-assing a couple six figure government projects a year and doing fuck-all the rest of the time.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
When will she digivolve to Ultimate? And what will her new powers be?
" UK Gov't To Review Hundreds of Websites, Axe Many of Them"
Axe them? Axe them what?
The budget/visitors metric is a meaningless financial one. If they don't sort websites according to the problems their lack will cause, they'll certainly need an army of clerks, mainly good ole telephone centres, to deal with all the minor requests a citizen might pose, like:
- looking up legislation or organisational details of an institution (e.g. addresses, phone numbers)
- finding white papers and other govt publications
- tracking the correct person to address in order to find relevant information
- finding the aforementioned person's email
- etc etc
Perhaps the big plan is to outsource such website-provided services to India?
I worked in local government from 2005 to 2009 where I was involved with the 'Priority Service Outcomes' basically a list of targets with a value attached; if you do x number of these you'll get to keep a boat-load of money from central government. We were quite a small council and I built a website and CMS which met the targets of guidelines; I used all open-source tools and implemented things in a very standards compliant way. Other councils I met with (we all had the same targets) were spending £100K+ on proprietary systems and adopting non-standard approaches. It's pretty criminal really; ~450 councils in the UK all going off in different directions and spending the same amount of money. Whitehall should have spent £200K on open-source projects such as Drupal or Django and an army of volunteers through sponsorship; they'd have a much better system with no waste and no repeat of effort, not to mention the improvements that could be brought back to the projects themselves.
I left the public sector very frustrated; jobs for the boys. There's a lot of talented people in local government, but, they're usually not at the top which is full of lifers with no ambition or clue.
And that's the way I like it!
The kind of country where contradiction is not welcome is not the country where I'd want to live. There may be pros and cons to eating chips or fries, and I think the government should release all that data and let the public decide.
Think of your mini-rant on how that food is called. What would you say if some "Royal Council on Nutrition Terminology" decided that "chips" should be called "fries"? Geroge Gershwin said it best:
"You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto;
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let's call the whole thing off!"
It strikes me as ironic that more and more UK resembles the dystopian world of 1984 that described life in London itself.
The UK needs to get a constitution ASAP, so that it's citizens are protected from the state, or else this kind of action will get worst to the point of no return.
Those are malaises of *big organizations*, it has nothing to do if they are part of the government or private companies.
Some internationl banks for example function pretty much as Communist bureaucracies, where you need to fill 10 forms and the intervention of several people (4 to 5 if you are lucky)to plug a network cable to a computer.
It's not the contradiction that gets me - it's that anyone in gov thinks that it's necessary to promote eating chips.
Every town has several chip shops, most pubs and restaurants serve them, all the supermarkets sell them surveys show that people are eating them several times a week and some people at every (non-breakfast) meal time. They are considerably less healthy than other options ... so government are spending money promoting them and hiring (C-list) celebs to do videos and such.
There can be no one in Britain that lacks knowledge of chips.
The other more general issue I have is that the gov do individual tendering and have individual web departments to manage all those sites - they should just use a standard couple of CMSs across gov. They don't need to brand everything or have bespoke sites all the time. They should be providing information not marketing things to us.
My blog had 280357 visits in the last year - that means if it were a gov site it would have cost £3.3 Million GBP to upkeep.
Actual costs assuming I'm paid £20 per hour, so est. £40 per hour employer costs, would be less than £2k for sure. If you assume those costs include all background research and what have you then maybe it would be as much £4k.
They only want to ditch those slow and expensive custom build content management systems in favor of Drupal/Joomla. This is just an excuse because a lot of people don't like to hear about open source.