[LINK] Knight of razor to slash government spending

[Kim Holburn]

On 2008/Apr/25, at 3:23 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:

> At 06:18 PM 15/04/2008, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>> ... Minister Tanner asks the questions "We're asking why do we have  
>> 800 different federal websites, and why do we need 164 different  
>> systems for processing grant applications?
>>
>> ... It is quite possible that it is much more cost effective to  
>> have them as individual systems. ...
>
> Apart from saving a few servers,

You can save servers by using virtualisation, and they probably should  
any way, lots of advantages.  This in itself would reduce lots of  
duplicated work and allow a lot of flexibility without changing much  
of the application layers.

> I expect consolidating web services would reduce duplicated work  
> being done by web workers and media people in agencies. It seems  
> silly to have these creative people in each agency and then try and  
> get them to not be creative and use the standard commonwealth wide  
> corporate logo, look and feel.

It sounds simple: "duplicating services" but what you end up with is  
each agency has different requirements and they each have to do just  
as much work to shoe-horn their requirements into the "standardised"  
system as they might have to build from scratch.

> If agencies have a need to do something genuinely different for a  
> real requirement, that is okay. As an example, Defence Recruiting  
> need something different. But for standard web pages on standard  
> topics across agencies to be all made to look different is a waste  
> of time and money, as well  as making the web system harder for the  
> client to use.

Clients are good at making things hard to use even if all the websites  
look alike.  There can be different problems like not easily being  
able to work out which website you're on.

"it's not easy to make things fool-proof because fools are so  
ingenious".

Diversity has a lot of benefits too.  Sites are not all vulnerable to  
the same security problems, the same network bottlenecks, you wouldn't  
get a large slice of government agencies all going off-line at once etc.

>>

--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3494957443
mailto:kim at holburn.net  aim://kimholburn
skype://kholburn - PGP Public Key on request

Democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.
                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961