An 18-month hold up with the Isle of Wight Council’s new £765,000 ‘enormous beast’ of a website must not be allowed to spiral out of control, the authority’s scrutiny committee has warned.
So far, £200,000 has been spent on the first phase of the project and as it moves onto the second, concerns have been raised following an internal review, which found multiple risks, including ‘significant weaknesses’ in its management.
The current website has over 2,000 web pages, 1,300 service documents, 180 forms connecting to automated systems, 56 in-house built systems like the tip booking system, as well as externally commissioned systems which all need to be brought across to the new site.
The task has been described as ‘incredibly complex’ by the council’s corporate services director, Claire Shand, but she has admitted it was an error to continue the project over the pandemic, when multiple staff had been moved to help COVID response efforts.
Councillor Ian Stephens, cabinet member in charge, said the Alliance administration had ‘got on with the job’ with support from officers and had managed to get ‘the project back on track’.
Calls came from the committee and fellow cabinet member, Councillor Chris Jarman, however, to pause and ‘get to grips’ with the project before continuing, or consider if there is another way forward. Cllr Jarman said the project had many points of complexity and said independent evaluation would help find the right direction, before more taxpayers’ money is spent.
The committee unanimously voted in favour of creating a group to review the project and it will also keep a closer on it in future.
Councillor Michael Lilley raised numerous issues but also questioned why the council wanted to ‘reinvent the wheel’ when it could get a website from another authority.
Ms Shand said while it seemed like a brilliant idea, it is ‘not necessarily the case’ as each authority has its own policies and conventions but the team is working closely to share and learn from other authorities.
The committee unanimously voted in favour of creating a group to review the project and it will also keep a closer on it in future.
A camel is a horse designed by a committee……
Look out for an expensive herd of camels to pay for in a few months time.
Can’t they do anything simple any more so we can all use it without having to have a degree in electronics
Lets hope they are not using Java for their backend. Google log4j
Hey scrutiny committee, wake up. It has already spiraled out of control. Come on, make these people accountable for their actions.
make them pay for the cock up out of there wages and not us council tax payers
They need to explain how this electronic B.S has cost US so much already, we pay for their ineptitude which unfortunately is not in short supply, unlike our hard earned money!
Ridiculous. Its already out of control, if ever there was a case of the tail wagging this dog, its here. A massive expensive to build and maintain website with all it complexities and breakdowns such as this is doomed to be a white elephant. And we will pay and pay and pay…………….like the farcical insult that is the chain ferry.
hear we go again how much more tax payers money is will be wasted on another wight elephant , 3/4 of a million ,most certainly need a scrutinised