£32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website 150
An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"
Re:Runs on Oracle stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
I would like to know where you are buying your Oracle licenses 'cause I'm paying something like £20000 anually for my Enterprise license (for a quad core, single socket server)
Re:Shhhhh (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, the cost I stated above was for the redesign. I'm sure you can make your own mind up about how it was such a huge failure.
http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/ [birmingham.gov.uk]
Re:I'm going to call BS on this article. (Score:1, Interesting)
There has been a noticeable rise in the number of pro-Conservative Party articles on Slashdot. They're almost exclusively some whine that makes government stupid or the Labour Party look bad. Maybe it's some politically active nerd ego, or part of an organised campaign. I don't know but this run of articles looks more than a bit fishy to me.
I'm long-term unemployed and on sick pay. Yes, I'm one of those "lifestyle scroungers" the Chancellor of the Exchequer likes to slag off. He has one of the most powerful jobs in the country and an inheritor to a fortune while I'm effectively unemployable and the sort of job I could or want to do is unavailable because people with the power and money to create them spend that investment wealth on flash cars. I daresay spending £20 a month on the internet (which is my major source of entertainment and window on the world) is an example of me being on the gravy train but I'm acutely aware of the things I can't do and the life opportunities I've missed out and am missing out on.
People rolled over and passively took these bastards ideologically driven fantasies in the ass the last time around but I'm hoping this time is different. And this time I don't want to see Labour just use the poor as a passport to power and screw us the other way. This time there have to be a list of demands and real and meaningful consequences to them not being delivered. I'm fed up with this kick the victim routine. People have the power to end it.
I obviously have to be careful what I'm saying for legal reasons but if the Toffs have their flash cars and big houses targeted, and some fat cat banker gets stabbed in the street I'm not going to get in anyone's way.
Waste,Incompetence,Fraud in Govt IT? Its All True (Score:1, Interesting)
I work in IT. I used to hear about those government projects with 10-100x cost overruns and think, "those numbers can't be true". Then I spent almost 4 years consulting for various government agencies, and sadly all those stories of waste, incompetence, and flat out fraud are all true. The experience was tramautic for me. If you work in IT, are good at what you do, and take pride in doing a good job then stay the fuck away from any goverment projects.
In government IT projects you'll meet $1500/day contractors who have worked on projects for 3 or more years without delivering a single line of working code, people who have "re-written" the same system every year for 4 or more years, "managers" who surreptitiously get 10-30% kickbacks from the contractors they hire, projects that require 3 years to fix after they were "100% complete" and voted "project of the year" by the local branch of the PMI, people with "certifications" who don't have a clue, and an army of consultants who have made a career of going from failed project to failed project.