Re: [Fsfe-uk] dotP

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 22:48 +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> It would be an interesting piece of research for someone to trawl
> through Hansard and the news sites, looking for costings of Govt. ICT
> solutions, and totting them up.

I should also add to this project; "Go through Hansard and find out the
*true* cost of DoTP" :). God this is good:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-03-12.1828W.9&s=dotp#g1829W.0

"To ask the Secretary of State for Health what the cost in (a) financial
  and (b) other terms was in (i) each financial year since 1997 and (ii)
          200304 until the latest date for which figures are available"

The average annual cost of the Dept. of Health website between 1998 and
2004 is 3.04M (av. of 500k per year, I guess). The DoH migrated to
DoTP in the beginning of 2004, and this migration apparently took some
time (www.dh.gov.uk is the new site, www.doh.gov.uk is the old one). The
project costs are apparently:

Financial Year  Total cost 000s
200203          1,121.4
200304          2,136.8
        Total:  3,258.2 (added by Alex for your convenience).

So, the cost of migration to DoTP was 3.3 million over two years? Or,
more than 200k greater than the total cost of running the website for
the previous six years? Maybe the new website should have been
www.d'oh.gov.uk :D

Is the 3M above factored into the 40M figure given by the Home Office?
If not, what is the *true* cost of DoTP? And, what is the running cost
of DoTP?

Cheers,

Alex.

PS. Their website performance monitoring - visits, etc. - seems pretty
shoddy, and they don't have up-to-date figures. In fact, they stop just
before the new website launched. Why? Can they not track visitors any
more? Or is there another skeleton in the closet?

PPS. Clue to the DoTP running cost? They say the people using it are:
"Department of Health, Healthcare Commission, HM Revenue and Customs
(specifically Child Trust Fund), Cabinet Office (specifically
e-Government Unit and Directgov)". Let's assume they were all users in
2004-5, and that the planned 11.3M spend is right. We have five
departments using it, and even though DoH are likely to tower over the
likes of eGU in terms of size, let's split the 11.3M five ways - that's
about 2M each. That's still four times greater than what the DoH were
spending on their website annually without including the migration
costs...