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Alan Pelz-Sharpe

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Justifying the cost of e-government

9-Jul-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Enterprise Search, Portals and Content Integration, Web Content Management, European Marketplace, Government

There is an outcry in the UK at the moment over the cost of building and maintaining Government websites.  The figures released by the government relating to individual department website costs (you can read them here) do raise a few eyebrows to be sure, but the numbers alone do not tell the full story.  When millions of pounds, euros, or dollars get spent to build websites or e-government applications it's right and proper to exercise due oversight.

However just as important is to understand the purpose of the project, and its objectives.

If the objective is to present web pages to explain what it is your department does, then that can be done for a very low cost. But if the goal is to create complex and highly scalable online business applications, then costs will rise steeply. They can soar for a variety of reasons, most importantly that the development work is simply very difficult and time consuming. Just because what the citizen eventually sees is a website does not mean that money got spent solely on some design and a Web CMS; more likely it's extensive back-end business process automation that runs up the costs.

Poring through the detail of the Government's document there are clearly many questions that need to be asked. Questions such as whether current procurement systems that favor huge bundled deals, from equally huge suppliers, really deliver the benefits promised.  Over the past decade there has been a move to consolidate buying activities into as few cycles as possible, ranging from buying government-wide licenses to Microsoft products to mega-deals to build and source online systems through a single vendor.  Though there was likely good logic behind these initial moves, it's time to really examine if the benefits in terms of cost savings and efficiency gains were delivered, or not.

But then that is a different debate to the one emerging in the UK. That debate has collapsed into a a cry from the hordes that if only it had all been done on (take your choice) SharePoint, WordPress, Open Source...then everything would be fine.  Regardless of the fact that the cost of software is typically only a small component of larger projects, and though savings can and should be found, they are seldom anything like as substantial as their proponents would have you believe. The cost of software is not the primary problem.

Delivering online services requires a lot of pre-planning, change management, business analysis, testing and prototyping.  The fact that many e-government services either replace or work in conjunction with existing human/manual services ends up layering complexity on complexity -- plus politics. And when you consider that Government services are expected to meet higher regulatory standards than most (not the least of which accessibility), the costs mount even further. In short the move to electronic services is by its nature costly. What you are doing in reality is building complex business applications for citizens that are exposed through the web.

The move to e-government has been seen as an imperative for the past 10 years. The closing down of locally staffed offices of various government departments has been rapid and the rate of closure continues, to be replaced in many cases by online services.  A more valuable discussion may be had in examining the true value and cost of online services, where they work and where they don't.  At present we seem to be caught between a situation where it is taken to be indisputable that all manual and human based processes are old fashioned and must be automated as soon as possible. Contrast this with the dawning reality that automating  human processes can prove to be hugely expensive, and often less efficient.

The 600,000 employees that the UK government is set to shed in the next year or so will need to be replaced with something. The trouble is that we may not be as far down the technology path as big IT suppliers would have you believe. All we know for sure at this point is that most big e-government exercises have fallen well short of delivering on their promises. Sure we can scale systems to unbelievable heights and deliver speeds and feeds unthinkable just a few years ago, but our ability to navigate and automate well-proven, human oriented tasks hasn't progressed anything like as quickly. The result? Bloated budgets and failed projects.