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OSHA App Costs Gov't $200k
itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'll cost you a pretty penny. Using MuckRock to file a Freedom of Information Act, Rich Jones of GUN.IO discovered the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration paid $106,467 for the Android version; $96,000 for the iPhone version, and an additional $40,000 for a BlackBerry app that never got distributed."
... plus $106,000 for change management.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
The iPhone version was $56,000. The Blackberry version was $40,000. Together, they were $96,000. It says this very clearly in the original scan.
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The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.
So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.
So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.
$96000 / $150 per hour = 640 hours, 640 hours = 16 man-weeks. You have a team of four people working on it for four weeks, you rack up about that much cost. And $150 an hour billed to the government is cheap.
All of the bureaucratic red tape exists to be able to say "we can account for your money" to the tax payer, but what the tax payer really wants is just to get the damn job done cost-effectively.
At least until there's some scandal. Then those same taxpayers start yelling about "why wasn't there anybody to check this stuff out?"
Keep in mind that the bureaucracy didn't just appear out of thin air. It came about because of scandals. We taxpayers want our tax dollars to not end up in some political crony's pocket, so there has to be lawyers to make sure this doesn't happen. There have to be accountants who track the money and make sure that it goes where it's supposed to go. There have to be auditors who make sure that the government is getting what it paid for.
It's really easy to have the knee-jerk reaction--"WHAT!? $100,000 to develop an app that I could probably write in a weekend?!" And I agree wholeheartedly with that reaction. The question is, would you rather pay $100,000 to make sure that the app appears on the other side or would you rather just write a check for x dollars and not have any idea what happened to that money? Nope, sorry, you can't have both.
I get that many, many people believe that the people belong to the government (hence your post, for instance) but that is dead wrong. The government does not "represent" the people. The people ARE the government. The government's money IS the people's money. You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach. Your attitude is the problem, not the solution.
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Ya, and depending on how involved those tasks are, that doesn't sound all that unreasonable, it's just an excuse of politicians to yell about things. Developer churn is about 10-11k/month at the best of times, so 10 'man months' of developer time (3 people for 3 months + some of a manager) gets you pretty close to those numbers. In all of that you have to develop, verify, test, test compliance (accessibility etc.) before you can distribute.
Those figures actually seem pretty reasonable. Not only do you have a 'developer' but you have to have an artist, there's oversight and meeting time to arrange it etc. Oh and since it's a private company, they need to be making moneywhich is probably 10-20 %. +
I'm working on a mobile project right now, where we have 9 'sub modules' of the app, which are done, and we're going to add 3 more across 3 platforms, one for bus location services, one for building room locations, one for exam schedules. The planning for this involved 7 people, (this is for a student project that will be deployed for a production system), two people from ITS, the two course developers/instructor/TA (one of those is me), two people from legal, and security about how we handle some information with students (or don't), and then the undergraduate chair. We've had two meetings already, which if you price it out, for the work done for the meetings plus development time, you're looking at already having spent 10k or so, and we haven't actually got formal requirements, nor have we let students touch a line of code yet. This is going to run, just on our end, about 40-50k, and that's with students doing the actual programming. And we already have art assets to be pulled from our communications department, but those cost money to make too, and the actual services themselves needed to be created (which cost a LOT of money, we're just doing the client).
So in short, that seems about realistic. And that's the problem, people are going to jump up and down and complain, but from what I can tells this seems about reasonable value for money. You may disagree with if the money should have been spent at all (and that's a valid ideological position I suppose), but it doesn't seem like it's that far off base.
Also, I'd kinda like to see the government offer more web and mobile services where appropriate. That might mean that you spend some time on simple stupid things while you learn just what is involved, and as with any spending programme, some things you spend money on will turn out badly. But that's alright.
You think this cost $200k? Let me guess, you work for the government?