Minchin said the total cost “includes the previously stated $4.1m required to redesign the front end of the websites”.
“The remaining cost ($92.4m) reflects the significant investment required to fully rebuild and test the systems and technology that underpin the website, making sure it is secure and stable and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from our observing network and weather models,” Minchin said.
So 92 MILLION dollars on SQA and maybe some pentesting? Bullshit. Pentests run $50k-$400k for single-domain websites like this, and $400k is on the very expensive end.
Even if you paid 30 people $200k apiece for 4 years to work on this, which is more people and at higher salaries than would have happened, that would still only come to $24m, less than a third of the cited cost.
There is no possible way for this to have legitimately cost this much. There was corruption of some kind involved.
I work at a large company that is critically dependent on VAX software written in the 1980s for almost every aspect of functioning. This was recognized as a problem. A replacement coding and testing team was established. It included a full-time team of contractors - a handful US based and I believe dozens located in India - along with a few full-time dedicated employees and maybe a dozen each of people brought part time out of retirement (the people with the 1980s knowledge!) and people with other main jobs who had to start dedicating significant time to support.
It ran for two years, then two more years, then another year. Very much a case of “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know” in that the more functions were programmed and tested, the more edge cases and sub-function requirements were uncovered. This program has been upgraded in pieces by so many people for so many decades that no one realized how hugely complex it had become, and what an enormous undertaking it would be to replace it. But after five years - more than double the original two-year projection - it was coming together, more things being really finalized than new needs being uncovered.
And then the software that the replacement program was being written with lost support. It was too old. Documents were written to try to give some future team a better chance of success, and everything was disbanded and shut down.
Being peripherally involved in that really made me more sympathetic to fiasco large tech projects.
More likely mismanagement, miscommunication, rewrites, and incompetence than corruption.
All projects of sufficient complexity overrun their cost/time estimates. That’s not even accounting for designers and programmers trying to hit what is likely a moving target.
92 million dollars over cost on a 4.1 million dollar project is not incompetence and mismanagement.
Doubling the cost of a project should have triggered reviews or an audit. 23x’ing the cost of a project is either corruption, or such gross negligence with public funds as to be criminal all on its own.
The 4.1m was the budget for the front-end. The back-end changes were initially budgeted as 31m but tripled in cost as the project dragged on and contracts needed to be extended.
The website revamp was part of a larger overhaul of BoM’s IT systems dating back a decade that has cost taxpayers $866m after a 2015 “serious cyber intrusion” exposed vulnerabilities in its systems.
You threw out four years as an estimate of the time period involved, but if I am reading the article correctly this was more like ten years.
Ten years was the total time for everything under the “larger overhaul”. The frontend website portion is not broken down.
This is why it’s important that governments can shop around and negotiate as well. What the fuck do you mean it costs $78m for Accenture to redesign a website? I’ll gladly do it by myself for half of that.
If the government procurement person doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, they are likely to choose the bidder who also doesn’t really understand the deep technical requirements, and is the low bidder because they don’t realize what they are getting themselves into.
By the time everyone realizes how much more is really required, they are already halfway through the project. The government could have saved money by choosing a more realistic higher bidder to start with. But once they have half a program from the low bidder, throwing that away and starting over doesn’t save any money. Better to just finish with the team that’s invested with the project.
This should be criminal, somehow.
