[LINK] CSIRO quizzed on $9.47m web site

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

With no access >at all< to how the money was spent, it occurs to me to 
ask: how much on an annual basis does one pay for a class A address block?

RC

Craig Sanders wrote:

>On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 04:26:19PM +1100, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>  
>
>>Eric Scheid quoted:
>>    
>>
>>>CSIRO quizzed on $9.47m web site
>>>      
>>>
>> 
>>    
>>
>>>BY the time the CSIRO?s new internet presence is operational at the end of
>>>April, it will have cost the cash-strapped agency over $9.47 million.
>>>
>>>The expense, criticised by Labor Senator Kim Carr in Senate estimates
>>>hearings yesterday, includes $3.25 million for CSIRO.au this financial year.
>>>      
>>>
>>So what would Kim Carr know about the benefit to CSIRO from the
>>expenditure of that money?
>>
>>If his logic is $9.47 million == a lot of money == a Bad Thing(tm) (and
>>my reading of the report is that this is the case) then he is blindly
>>doing what oppositions do - ie opposing for the sake of opposing. No
>>understanding of the project, just horror that anyone would spend this
>>sort of money on IT. Any opposition that just does that can plan on a
>>really long time doing it.
>>    
>>
>
>
>a million dollars would buy you a massive load-balanced web server farm AND a
>year or two's worth of salaries for a sysadmin and asst, 3 or 4 programmers, 3
>or 4 web monkeys, and 1 or 2 people to liase with the various CSIRO
>projects/depts/groups and help them get their stuff onto the main site.  might
>even buy you a good technical manager(*) for the project too - if not, under
>$100K or so would.
>
>2 million would fund the whole thing (incl. salaries, hardware upgrades &
>replacements etc) for at least 3 years.  3 million should see it through for
>at least 5 (probably much longer since you probably only need all of the
>programmers and web developers for the first year or so - then cut back to a
>maintainence & support team)
>
>
>i dunno what $9.5M would buy you but it would have to be a lot more than just
>one web site (even if it does merge in 250 smaller sites - having run servers
>with over 500 sites on them, i can tell you that it's not much harder to
>manage 500 sites than it is to manage 1 site....if you have a clue and enough
>shell & perl scripting skill to automate the routine/repetitive jobs).   
>
>
>hooray for outsourcing.  give millions of public dollars away to overpriced,
>underskilled, under-clued "consultants" to end up with a system that is slow,
>clumsy, and nobody wants to use.  i know what i call this, i call it corporate
>welfare.
>
>
>(*) a *good* tech manager is one who can actually manage technical people -
>this requires reasonable technical knowledge (enough to at least understand
>the technology and avoid being blinded by the glare from glossy brochures)
>PLUS the ability to just set the overall goals & deadlines and then step back
>to let the techs get on with the job without interference.  they also act as a
>buffer between the techs s/he is managing and the rest of staff & management.
>a quite rare combination of skills (even rare than good techs), but worth
>their weight in gold if you're lucky enough to find one.
>
>
>craig
>
>ps: even though truly skilled sysadmins, programmers, and web designers are
>fairly rare, i doubt if CSIRO would have difficulty finding appropriately
>competent staff - the geek factor of the interesting stuff CSIRO does (or
>would be doing if they weren't being corporatised and underfunded) is enough
>to attract hordes of geeks.
>
>pps: no need to spend millions on some crappy proprietary CMS, either.  a free
>CMS package called bricolage runs on apache with mod_perl and postgres.  there
>are numerous other free software alternatives, too - and most are every bit as
>good (or better!) than the commercial proprietary packages (which don't come
>with source and are thus difficult, extremely expensive, or impossible to
>customise).
>
>
>  
>