wtf?
£20M a year for a website?
mannn i need to get one of these gov contracts! i canmiss deadlines, overcharge and lose data for a lot less than that!
Capita has launched the bundled-together NHS websites - NHS Direct and NHS Choices. It was named as preferred supplier in July. The DoH is paying £60m for three years, with an option to extend that for another two years. The site offers information on symptoms, courtesy of NHS Direct, as well as a directory of NHS services. …
No-knowledge public sector IT spenders go with the Crapita contract. Glad to see anyone learns any lessons, ever.
(Disclosure: I work for a company that provides award-winning IT service to local/national government, but against whom Crapita's top-notch sales team sometimes win bids, despite Crapita's consistently shocking work)
This is probably one of the best Register headlines ever. And quite appropriate too. We all are gong to be paying out of our pocket for something that can be done with one rack worth of blade servers running any odd load-balancing software configured by a beginner PFY.
However, this is public sector, so value for the taxpayer's money is clearly not part of the equation. All hail the porkfest!!!
Is it just me, or would anyone else here like to have been offered that site building deal? I reckon I could have thrown together something pretty nifty for that much...
I wonder how much of that budget is earmarked for talking shops. Preliminary planning meetings to discuss the optimal methodologies for deciding what type of chocolate biscuits to serve at the kickoff, kind of thing...
The icon is a taxpayer's coat being rifled for any spare loose change...
Is the article true - i.e. all the facts in there. It cannot possibly be £60M for just combining and maintaining 2 web sites and running them for 3 years.
At £1000 a day, £60m = 60,000 man days = 272 working man years of effort. Over 3 years, this is 90 people per year. What on earth are 90 very expensive people doing ?
Can El Reg fire off a freedom of information act request to get the exact details of what the government has actually bought. In these recessionary times, I find it hard to believe money could possible be squandered in this way. Hence, the article could be misleading if it's not just a web site but some super AI query system being developed as well...