Guest comment: New Bham Council website "an expensive disaster"
Guest comment: New Bham Council website "anRoss Riley, technical director of Birmingham digital agency One Black Bear, reviews Birmingham City Council's much-maligned £2.8m website.
With an investment of that size you'd expect that we'd be talking about a vast improvement in the city council's public face and a revolution in local democracy. Instead we're left surveying another catastrophic disaster in a long line of public sector web projects.
The first response from the council was to send in the PR guns who dismissed criticism of the new site as the mumblings of the Twitterati rather than representative of the thoughts of residents. [Birmingham Post - 8 Sep]
Unfortunately my possession of a Twitter account may also disqualify comment but as a Birmingham resident I can't be alone in wondering how an initial budget of £500,000 managed to spiral to the final figure and the council's response shows how little they seem to understand about the process.
The Council point to the 17,000 page count and the improved search facility but the reality is that much of the content for these pages already existed and creating it is the responsibility of staff outside of this budget. The search is handled by Google Search Appliance which whilst being a vast improvement on the old site costs just a few thousand pounds to install.
The running theme throughout the site is the complete lack of even a hint of quality. There's the amateur feel of the graphics in the header, the massively bloated size of the pages, the search facility being left open to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, the painfully slow load times and the lack of any design input or consistency throughout the entire site.
There's only two possible reasons as to why this project has ended up as such an expensive disaster. Either the team running it had no expertise in online projects and failed to see that they were being overcharged for sub-standard work or someone on the project team is plotting an escape to Panama with a couple of million in notes.
What's most galling about the whole debacle is the missed opportunity for Birmingham. A £2.8m investment could have delivered one of the best online destinations in the UK. Birmingham could have broken new ground in providing services to its residents taking influence from the participatory nature of the web today.
How about a collaborative Wikipedia-style area of the site to allow everyone to contribute to Birmingham's online history? Maybe we could have pioneered a way to allow residents to report problems, or provide online democracy to get instant feedback on what residents feel most strongly about. What we have instead is 17,000 pages without a single good idea as to how the Council could use its website to better serve Birmingham residents.
Ross Riley is technical director of Birmingham digital agency One Black Bear
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Comments
Somebody's off with the loot I reckon. If this site had cost even the original £500k it would have been a scam.
Mind you if the agency involved charged for every single billable hour of what was probably a bunfight between departments and stakeholders then it probably would add up to this amount.
had a quick look and it is pretty poor! Could The Drum get someone from BCC to explain what the money was spent on?
Do we know who is responsible for creating it? or was it an internal job?
www.birminghamitsshit.co.uk
I believe it was a Capita built site, which goes to show why the bill was probably so large. They charge about five grand for making a coffee, but forget the milk and then remember they also need to bill a further six grand for thinking about making the coffee and another two grand for having the need for a cup in the first place...
Its the lack of accountability that is the issue for me. If this was a private company and a manager had brought a project in 2 years late and £2m over budget - they wouldnt have a job for long.
Leaving your web address eh Chris. Vulture. This isn't a site to tout for business my cold friend.
I'm just off down to the BCC now with a boot full of old rope. I'm gonna be minted!
There's nothing more cowardly than an opportunist.
Yep, the site was built by our old friends at Crapita. Budgets in advertising may have been slashed but it's always nice to see that the giant public sector contractors are thriving in these straightened times.
How's that NHS IT modernisation coming along by the way?
Five years late and projected to cost £12.7 billion, apparently. Nice work if you can get it.
What was wrong with the Anon who commented Chris shouldn't throw stones in glass houses? His web page is very poor.
I think the censorship on this site is very unbalanced.
it’s easy to slag other work without taking a long hard look at your own out put.
Not the best and certainly not the worst website I’ve ever seen, but a missed opportunity to push the boundaries of public funded information based site. (Look at how the BBC manages, like it or not, to make vast amounts of content engaging an accessible).
Most people in the industry would be embarrassed, not by the website, but the amount of public money they managed to bill for such a disappointing outcome.
I find it surprising that as the project became later and later, with costs rising higher and higher, that someone could continue to approve its development, to the tune of an additional £2.3m!
We need to hear the justification for such a massive spend.
shoddy and uthe cone removal request form (wtf?) hasn't been tested
Seriously terrible public sector work here. Many people would have been fired prior to the site going near 1.5m let along the astronomical figure it did if this was a commercially led enterprise.
It's a complete injustice to the people of Birmingham that this is not better. They deserve and should expect better off their council.
@ Anonymous Tue 15 Sep 2009 15:06
"There's nothing more cowardly than an opportunist."
That doesn't make sense on so many levels.
First, this is a marketing site, meaning I assume you work in the field. And you're having a go at someone who uses a website aimed at his target market to take an opportunity to market himself? Very bizarre indeed.
Second. Well, it just doesn't make sense. Opportunists are not by definition cowards. In this case, putting your name and details out there could be called brave considering our country's wonderful talent for putting people down at every opportunity.
Spot on, Anon 15.06. Spookily, I was going to make both those points myself. (Although I would've left the moany bit about "our country putting people down" off at the end.)
When will councils realise that it is not the cost of the web project, but the creative and useable output that makes a web site functional, easy to use and dare I say nice to look at. 2.8m! What an utter disgrace. Wast of tax payers cash. Shame on the unscrupulous agency, whoever they are, who even dare to justify that amount of money! Surely there must be an account of what time was spent on the site and how long it actually took to design and build. Just had a look through it and doesn't even look that big a site to be fair. Oh well at the end of the day most agencies see local government accounts as a cash cow anyway, so how is the industry going to change and how are local councils going to save money if they keep throwing it good money after bad. Ho hum!
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