[LINK] CSIRO quizzed on $9.47m web site

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Craig Sanders wrote:
 
> 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.

snip more technology stuff...

With the greatest respect, I would suggest that you don't understand why
these projects cost what they do. Firstly, the technology and its
support probably costs a lot less than the million dollars, certainly in
the first year. I doubt that they buy the gear, it is probably leased.

Secondly, in a project like this, the cost of the IT is only a very
small component. A significant part of the cost is in development time
of the various web sites. Consistency of design, look and feel all take
a significant amount of time to produce.

Have you had a look at the site map?
http://www.csiro.gov.au/index.asp?type=blank&id=site_map

There are 215 <a href=> statements. I followed one at random and it had
35 further links, one of those had 45 further links.

If that were typical, there would be over 300,000 pages on the CSIRO
site.

If each page required one hour of human time for development, checking,
testing and putting into production, (a number which I suggest is very
low, even given a Content Management System) that's 3million person
hours. At $50 an hour thats $150 million

My numbers are obviously wrong, but not in the direction you are
presenting.

But there's more...

That was the cost of web page production. What costs even more is the
process of content development (ie what information should go on the
page) That requires the involvement of subject matter specialists - and
that costs even more.

$9.6 million strikes me as a bargain.

The problem with letting IT people run IT projects is that they don't
understand that the IT cost is a very small fraction of the total
project cost. When managers (and politicians) believe the IT people the
chances of a project being perceived as a success are really small.

Having been involved in a project that redeveloped a Federal Government
web site with a punny 20,000 pages, I would claim some small experience
in this area.

What's yours?

What's Senator Carr's?

-- 
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of
information can drive out knowledge. 
-- Daniel J. Boorstin

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au