How government procedures turn small graphics into big costs
Web producer reveals where the costs come from in work for Information Commissioner's Office
In an office in London, a web designer uses a larger version of a web logo to create a "favicon" a 32-by-32 pixel version that will be visible in the address bar of a browser when people visit the Information Commissioner's Office website.
Though the creation process is quite simple, confirming that it has been done correctly is not: what's been generated has to be created against a set of "functional specifications" laid out in the contract for the job colours, sizes, a long array of confirmations quite separate from the task of making the actual item.
That bumps up the time taken to between two and three "billable hours" for the designer, who works at Reading Room based in Soho one of the UK's biggest web agencies, with turnover of 12m and 170 staff whose time is charged at 600 per eight-hour day, significantly lower than many in the business.
But the favicon can't now simply be sent to the ICO site ready for uploading. First the company has to get approval from Capita, which has the contract to manage the site, and which may make its own comments about what it thinks, and at the very least has to check that it's the correct size; and then from Eduserve, which hosts the site and has to check it can in theory be uploaded; and from the Central Office of Information, which manages the ICO contract with Reading Room.
All in all, getting everyone involved to approve the favicon that has been created means the time taken balloons to a total of nearly seven billable hours which means Reading Room, as a commercial outfit, charges about 500; add VAT at the rate prevailing in 2010 and you reach 585.
And that is the magic number that appears in the ICO's PDF on the cost of its 40,569.79 corporate identity rebranding last ! year (in the 10 February to 20 April slot), and which was the subject of a separate freedom of information request by Mark Bowen, who says he filed the request because "I'm a web designer myself and knowing that a favicon has never taken me more than five minutes to create and install on any server I've ever worked on (and I've worked on many different types) I was quite astounded at the cost shown for such a simple task."
Margaret Manning, the chief executive of Reading Room, is not so much astounded as frustrated. Named female entrepreneur of the year in 2008, she finds the number of hoops that have to be jumped through to create a tiny icon frustrating too and feels that it is part of a culture in government that needs to change.
"What adds to the cost is the approval process, the editing and annotation and confirmation," she told the Guardian. "It's as though every piece of work were an encyclopedia article which had to go through a group of editors."
The unwieldy structure of the contract with Capita, Eduserve and the COI all adding to the time taken to make amendments suggests to her that some sort of change is needed in government contracts and their organisation.
"A lot of government contracts involve outsourcing the IT, which sounds like a great idea in many cases. But if you look at the hoops you have to go through ... it can make the amount of time needed by outside organisations just go up and up to get anything done."
She thinks there is a culture within government which doesn't try to reduce spending. Instead, she suggests, there is a culture of fear that something will go wrong whenever something is put on the web, which leads to a belt-and-braces approach that in turn pushes up costs and times above what any commercial organisation would spend.
"They're scared bec! ause the y're accountable to the public, unlike a commercial business," says Manning.
But she's also perplexed by the choices the government has made. "What commercial entity has Capita running its IT?" she asks rhetorically. (According to Capita's site, private sector clients include Zurich Insurance, The Children's Mutual and eircom.)
The problems with excessive spending by government on what seem in the private sector like simple contracts are not new. Incoming Conservative politicians and local councillors have pointed to the high costs of managing computer "desktops" (the systems used by civil servants) compared with the outside world. Last August Liam Maxwell at the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead reckoned that councils could save at least 51m, and potentially up to 200m, by shifting to open source from Microsoft Office but it would require a mandate from central government. That hasn't come.
In fact, one person recently told the Guardian privately of the experience of going to a meeting with a government department to talk about the Direct.gov website, and pointing out how it could be done for about 20,000 rather than the multimillion-pound costs presently involved.
"We're the government," replied one of the civil servants. "We don't have to do things cheaply."
As the person at the meeting points out, that confuses "cheap" and "less expensive" and it's the latter that the government needs to implement as swingeing cuts are implemented in the coming years.
The idea that a favicon that takes a web designer five minutes to create could end up consuming more than six hours of a designer's time plus uncounted (but certainly billable) hours inside at least three other organisations indicates that all the criticisms of government IT as unwieldy, o! verprice d and inflexible remain true.
On the high cost of the favicon, an ICO spokesperson said: "The old environment meant contractors had to liaise very closely to ensure successful implementation of the favicon and other changes. The new environment is easier to use and we can now update our website more quickly and easily.
"Our systems have to be highly secure and the site must adhere to government accessibility standards. They must be contractually sound with robust processes for all projects, however large or small. The cost reflects this not just the design of the favicon."
On corporate ID costs, an ICO spokesperson said: "We phased the new corporate identity in over a period of several months in order to keep costs down and to minimise our impact on the environment. Information about the costs has been published on our website since November 2009."
A spokesperson for Reading Room said: "Reading Room's work in relation to the ICO's favicon was undertaken as part of an ongoing maintenance agreement we have. Under this agreement, all work must go through stages before it is published live to the ICO website. This multi-staged process is typical for many large government websites and is necessary to avoid security breaches and ensure that the correct information is published.
"As you can see, the time and effort spent creating the favicon is a very small part of the overall process. As for our costs, in an independent survey conducted by YouGov in September 2010, Reading Room ranked sixth in the UK for the excellence in our value for money."
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