£32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website

An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"

Comments

Shhhhh

[Lije Baley]

It's just this kind of nonsense that keeps us computer folk employed.

Re:Shhhhh

[sortius_nod]

I have a T-shirt from think geek that sums it up:

"Technical Support: Your ignorance is my job security"

I wonder if this is the employee uniform at Capita?

Re:Shhhhh

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I live in Birmingham, I know people that work in IT at the council.

IT was taken over by Capitia, they also have contracts for many other councils and government departments. I have never known a corporate company to be so wasteful and incompetent.

Biggest news last years was the re-write of the web site. Was first estimated to be cost jut over £600k, and was to be competed in March 2006. However, Capita over-run and completed it mid 2009 at a cost of £2.2 million.

http://www.birminghampost.net/news/politics-news/2009/08/04/cost-of-new-birmingham-city-council-website-spirals-to-2-8m-65233-24307674/

Re:Shhhhh

[cyber-vandal]

They're called Crapita by Private Eye for a reason. However public service IT in the last 3 decades is a long story of waste, incompetence and stupidity. Hooray for privatisation - a worse service for a higher cost!

Re:Shhhhh

[Tanktalus]

As always, capitalism only works when all sides are peers in the transaction. That means that the person, or, in this case, the government bureaucrat, who looks for private companies to tender on a contract needs to be aware of what they're asking for. They need to understand what the transaction entails, and they need to understand the alternatives (whether hiring someone to do it in-house, or it's simply the competition in the marketplace). Any time you are at an informational disadvantage, you open yourself up to being taken for a ride. There's a reason why government tenders generally include the clause "we reserve the right to go with any vendor, not just the lowest bid" or something like that: so that they can weed out crackpot offers.

It seems to me, then, that the person in Birmingham's city government who decided to go with this outfit was at an informational disadvantage and could thus be duped by incompetent and/or malicious corporations. They apparently took the lowest bid, not the best bid.

bad story

[teknopurge]

The summary is disingenuous: the cost is for their IT, not just a single HTML website.

Re:bad story

[Anonymous Coward]

not only that, but the 48m is the amount the outsourcer has spent on improvements to their entire operation, not how much the council has spent.

The whole article is at best, poorly informed, at worst, outright lies.

Re:bad story

[jginspace]

The summary is disingenuous: the cost is for their IT, not just a single HTML website.

Could be:
http://www.capita.co.uk/about-us/Pages/Birmingham.aspx

Service Birmingham is our joint venture with Birmingham City Council, Europe's largest local authority, established in April 2006 to provide the Council's information and communications technology (ICT) services. Substantial investment and innovation have created an all-new platform that underpins the Council's ambitious business transformation programme. To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software - and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.

The cost of the site itself was covered a few months back - excellent reporting from Heather Brooke and friends:
http://podnosh.com/blog/2010/05/27/the-report-on-birmingham-gov-uk-is-published/
http://helpmeinvestigate.com/investigations/49-when-can-we-expect-a-new-birmingham-gov-website

I just took a look at their site

[Urd.Yggdrasil]

I just took a look at their site, which I thought must be amazing for that kind of money, and I found this: What exactly Birmingham City Council up to!? Perhaps the money is going someplace a bit more nefarious.

ICBM Address

[jginspace]

Yes you're definitely on to something:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICBM_address

Re:At least they didn't use frontpage

[CdBee]

We're dealing with Brummies here, lets not pretend that spelling is the most important problem they face.... Vuuurrrrrrrrry noyce....

I'm going to call BS on this article.

[Anonymous Coward]

The 48 million number? Is taken out of context from a company's own website. Context that is lacking is timeframe, actual details of the spending...and you know what, that's enough that I don't feel like going any further.

These numbers may be facts, but they aren't a story. They're just being used to drive emotions.

I say we mod Article Down.

Re:bad story - I must agree

[julesh]

Capita might be ripping off the good people of Birmingham

Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people. Here in Coventry, they've installed voice stress analysis software to attempt to detect people lying when they claim benefits... of course the fact that VSA is essentially snake oil hasn't stopped them spending millions on the piece of software this paper was written about. Well worth reading if you want to know the kind of junk our councils spend our hard earned cash on.

As a resident of Birmingham...

[greg_robson]

...I can say that we all waited ages for the site to relaunch, when it finally did we are shocked.

• Poor accessibility, basically the same content under a different template. It took them 2 months to get the "Pay your Council Tax online" feature working again.
• There was no consultation with the target audience (Birmingham City Council covers approximately 1.2 million people).
• All the features we were expected such as here's my postcode...
• • ...where's my nearest school/doctor"
  • ...who's my Member of Parliament
  • ...when do my bins (trash cans for those across the pond) get collected.
• ...were nowhere to be seen despite being common on many other council websites.

So bad is the situation, some local web developers have set up their own community built site:
http://www.bccdiy.com/
And while still in it's early days (design could be improved), it has the useful features and shows events that are taking place in what is a vibrant and modern city.

Re:efficiently...

[TheRaven64]

Probably because Yiddish is the best human language for expressing outrage. It even passes German in the ability to combine insulting someone with spitting on them.

Re:bad story - I must agree

[TheRaven64]

Crapita never do anything without ripping off good people

That's not fair. They do not practice any such discrimination, they're happy to rip off anyone - good or bad.