Category Archives: government information

The real value of high cost websites

Rory Cellan-Jones continues to uncover the costs of government websites in his blog. In his latest piece, he tries to unravel just exactly how a website (Business Link) can cost £35 million pounds a year to run.

Take some time out to read not just this article, but [some of] the many readers’ comments: from website developers who quote considerably less for the same work; from those who attempted to introduce freeware solutions inside government (to no avail) and those small-and medium-sized providers who lost out to the ‘big boys’ when bidding for government projects.

As we are all aware, the days of freespending on large projects should be well and truly behind us. In our September issue we will be publishing an article about cloud computing and its potential, not just to help organisations contain costs but also to help them build organisational capability.

Lessons to be learned at the Department for Education

For those looking for an example of poor information management practice, how about the Department for Education’s announcement about the closure of QCDA?

The first thing you might notice is the poorly formed URL, one which surely won’t survive any future changes in the content management system.

Then you might realise that the PDF has been published with no metadata. In addition, it has been scanned but not OCR’ed so cannot be indexed by Google.

So much for the principles of open linked data!