Local councils will carry on splurging on IT Despite the recession Kable believes UK local government ICT budgets will rise to nearly £4bn by 2016. Research by the publisher of GC News says that growth in technology spending will be driven by transformational outsourcing projects, online channels and mobile working. Its Local Government Forecast: Opportunities in …
"...it acknowledges big differences in the quality of council websites".
If they are different in quality, then we have to conclude that the sites themselves are different.
Why? All these organisations do much the same thing. OK, there are differences between, for example, city councils and district councils, and there will no doubt be some differences between councils in the same tier. But mostly it's all the same.
I don't suppose councils all write their own different accounting systems - why do they all need different web sites?
As a software supplier I should be glad they want to keep reinventing the wheel, but it still seems stupid.
Actually they do pretty much write their own accounting software.
All government departments have to go to tender for things like this, even if they know they will be doing the development internally and even if that development is just a clone of another department's system.
There is practically no communication, let alone sharing of resources between different councils. (In fact even departments inside those councils it's rare even for them to talk to each other). The fact that they all have different web sites is nothing more than a symptom of this underlying problem.
I think you are assuming that the people in charge of these things are a lot more competent than they actually are (not to mention free of political motivations and greed) if you think they'd be able to pull off having a centrally defined web site spec or such. Don't get me wrong, that would be great but it's just not going to happen.
... having written a spec for a local authority. The wider problem being that there is no guidance from central government on websites and other similiar channels so there's a lot of people in local authorities feeling around in the dark and in most cases getting ripped off by the private sector.
As for competent staff, they are a rare breed because the local authority just can't afford the wages for the people with the decent skillsets.
Lob off the head of a council at Director level and you'll more than likley find that it will be business as usual, there's at least minimum of half a mil saving a year.
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