Stay Smart Online - Latest Australian Government Initiative…
June 6th, 2008 Drazen Drazic Posted in Risk Management, Vulnerability Management, Web Application Security, cyber crime, news |
I wonder what the old teams and program developers at NOIE/AGIMO etc think about the latest re-branding of government’s effort to demonstrate care about individual’s and businesses use of IT. (As reported here). I remember the old NOIE site. It was pretty good; rich full of information and a great source of help and knowledge. It was a shame relatively very few people were aware of it.
The latest incarnation with a few added “features” comes at a cost of $1.2M (just on the contract alone to AusCERT as reported by the Australian Newspaper). Will be interesting to see how it all goes…….
June 6th, 2008 at 11:05 am
honestly, how the hell is 1.2mil spent on this.
i mean it’s nice enough. but i can’t see the justification of that much money. well, actually, i can see the justification (goverment always rates in terms of how much it will save them) but i can’t imagine the *need*. give me 500k even and i could put that together in a few months.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
@Silky, we looked at the RFP at the time and considered a response. One of my journo mates (not mentioning him now in case he does not want his name mentioned) talked about partnering with us to do it. Can’t recall exactly why we didn’t but it was either; we were running short of time to respond or just thought we wouldn’t get it anyway, (based upon previous experience in throwing our hat into the ring on gov tenders)….probably the latter.
If we did bother, we were going to come in at a **very small fraction** of the final accepted bid. (We did discuss it internally and priced the exercise based upon the RFP).
At that price, you’re talking quite a few full-time people per year to deliver a few alerts a week and some words around it. Surely the dudes at AGIMO have people with some spare time to do the same thing and saving the tax payer 1.2M? Seriously, even if you had one person on it at 80K per year, are they really going to be stretched? RSS feeds anyone? How hard to sift through and add commentary? Or am I missing something here?
Do the sums hey? Lets see what we get from it.
June 7th, 2008 at 12:25 am
Good to see this being questioned. The job as proposed in the RFP and the ultimate winner makes no sense. If the dollars are correct, and I assume they are, there needs to be an inquiry.
There is no expertise required to deliver a message to the public. All this job is is to place a message on a site and have someone look at it or subscribe. I can do that with your blog DD and if I need to consumer it, I can easily do that in the space of less than 30 minutes. Give me 50K and I will deliver that for the next 5 years. NO. make it 10. It is no brainer work.
June 10th, 2008 at 7:49 am
1.2 million on this but our armed forces buy their own boots because standard issue is so bad.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:20 am
@Anon, is that true? Regardless, it is worrying how we do spend tax payer money. Like others, the cost to run this seems way over the top but as mentioned in previous posts, lets see what comes out of it. I just can’t personally see, given government’s history in this field working outside of government how it’s going to be any different compared to previous initiatives. Maybe Auscert will surprise all. There is still many people in the security industry who think Auscert is a once a year conference at Surfers Paradise. Anyone here use Auscert at all or know much about what they actually do now?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:26 am
@Secman1
Yes it is true. I believe that the government has acknowledged this by at least allowing them to reimburse the cost of their own purchases. So we pay for dodgy supplies and then pay for better quality.