The £105 million website

 It has recently come to light that the HMRC website has cost £35 million per year over the last 3 years!

As a developer of websites, it is fair to say that I am more aware that the larger the website the more complex the technical requirements, non more-so than for a government operated site. Cost would naturally be high because of operational considerations such as content management, security implications, site reliability and visitor traffic on scales that most sites do not have to cope with. But even allowing for all of this, I am absolutely staggered at the cost.

I'm also pretty sure that if the costings were analysed closely, a dispraportionate amount of money would have been spent on the decision making process compared to the actual development or management of the website. If the layer after layer of bureaucracy that accompanies government projects was stripped back, vast amounts of money could be saved, but unfortunately, departments would much rather talk about what is going to be done and then refer to someone else than to actually make a decision - just in case at a later date, the decision could be deemed to have been wrong.

In my industry we call this process "death by committee", but whatever you want to call it, this stalling process delays projects and increases the end price.

This is one of the first areas that needs tackling if the government is to be more cost effective in future.

Read BBC blog entry "The £105 Million website"