Good grief!

[xoggoth]

This website has cost £105m so far apparently. Sure Nick could have done it a bit cheaper.

BBC - dot.Rory: The

[NickFitz]

Yep, I could have knocked that out for a mere £104 million - a £1 million pound saving to the taxpayer!

Of course, I could probably have knocked it out for vastly less (and even subcontracted a designer to make it look less pig-ugly), but much of the cost probably came about through the fallacy of the efficiency of internal markets: they needed information from HMRC which charged them £x for providing it, they needed information from the DTI which charged £x for providing it, and so on and so forth.

This business of one component of some overarching organisation (such as HMG) charging another component thereof for sharing information with it is ludicrous: if they have the information, and can tell the other lot how to access it, the cost of providing it has been about two minutes of one person's time sending an email with a link, or possibly slightly longer explaining how to access it over some internal Government network, or at worst the time taken to burn a set of those data DVDs they're so fond of leaving on trains.

Instead, they take the cost of aggregating the information (which they had to do anyway, usually by law) and then try to claw that cost back by charging the other component some part thereof, calculated according to some formula that probably doesn't make any sense in the first place, given that they don't know in advance which components might find a use for that data, and therefore can't calculate its value in advance.

If a Government department charges the "internal market" rate for providing data to another Government department, and at a later date finds that a bunch of other departments also want to make use of it, do they then give a refund to the first department that wanted it, given that the cost has now been spread across many "customers"?

Or, given that the cost of aggregating the information was always going to be there, is it a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul, with additional accountancy and administrative costs thrown in at every step of the proceedings?

[OwlHoot]

I've just renewed my road tax online here.

The font size is ludicrously small, especially as several long reference numbers need entering and carefully checking.

Makes this post look like a Sun headline. Obviously the utter fckwits who designed that site have never heard of the word "accessibility".

[thunderlizard]

Most of the budget would have been spent on writing the content surely? -of which there is lots, and given the complexity of business legislation it must have been a heroic job to consolidate like that. Also a little disingenuous to compare the cost to the number of users it gets, because most users will be representing many people.
But it is still a lot of pennies!

[thunderlizard]

I've just renewed my road tax online here.

...
Obviously the utter fckwits who designed that site have never heard of the word "accessibility".

Get off the road Mr Magoo!

[xoggoth]

through the fallacy of the efficiency of internal markets

Agree on that, quite ludicrous. (Shows even righties can be daft) Worked on job for CEGB during Thatcher era and they decided their training dept would start charging economic rate to other parts of the company. Cost was so high they started going outside and net cost to the whole CEGB was even higher.

[xoggoth]

So how come "BBC - dot.Rory: The £105m website" got put in as "BBC - dot.Rory: The" ??? Are you charging CUK £1m per character?

[NickFitz]

So how come "BBC - dot.Rory: The £105m website" got put in as "BBC - dot.Rory: The" ??? Are you charging CUK £1m per character?

Dunno, that's one of vBulletin's little tricks

I'll have a look at it and file a bug report with them, although the last bug I filed was rapidly marked down to "Minor" and remains unassigned to anybody for fixing