Government £6,000 per year per desktop spend a frightening insight into public sector

[JJonas]

Government £6,000 per year per desktop spend a frightening insight into public sector IT - IT Opinion from V3.co.uk

[SpuffMonkey]

I think I'd want some proper numbers for what that figure actually means!

[Hefferzzzz]

I think I'd want some proper numbers for what that figure actually means!

 

I agree. As for the authors comment 'According to my estimations – verified by a CIO – this figure should be less than £1,000 per year'.....oh really? Maybe for a standard office based desktop but no way when taking into account MI5 / MI6 etc type equipment.....

[dhicks]

Government £6,000 per year per desktop spend a frightening insight into public sector IT

 

Assuming a 5-year lifespan for IT equipment, if I simply take the amount we spend on IT in 5 years (including my wages) and divide it by the number of workstations I get (very roughly) £3,000 a workstation. That's probably a bit of an underestimate, though, as it doesn't really take into account power consumption or server upgrades. £6,000 sounds about right, especially if they have a rather better support-staff-to-workstatio ratio than the average school.

[glennda]

Yes as @dhicks says - 6000pa per desktop isn't a huge amount of money when you take into count the fact that they are probably taking all costs involved with IT and dividing by the amount of desktops so taking into account servers, switching etc etc

[teejay]

Erm, ours works out at about £680 per year per desktop including our whole IT budget, staff costs, electricity etc and we have quite an expensive disaster recovery/high availability solution in place which does cost a fair chunk each year. If we did it per user rather than per machine it works out at £209 per person (staff + students), so yes £6,000 per year seems pretty high.

[pantscat]

Have to agree with @dhicks and @glennda. That's a remarkably crap and sensationalist bit of journalism, which the Daily Mail would be proud of - pick some info out of someones report - don't actually give any of the full details and imply they're spending too much for something.

 

£6000 PA for a desktop PC could be quite right - depends on what's going on in the background infrastructure, software licences, cloud services, support contracts, warranties, staff costs... etc. etc. etc.

[dhicks]

Assuming a 5-year lifespan for IT equipment, if I simply take the amount we spend on IT in 5 years (including my wages) and divide it by the number of workstations I get (very roughly) £3,000 a workstation.

 

I've just realised I should, of course, divide that number by 5 to get a per-year figure - heck, I'm better value than I thought :-) £6,000 per year per workstation does seem a bit high, but (as the Slashdot thread points out) the article is mainly guesswork and you can imagine "government" covers things like healthcare and agencies that have their own in-house applications to develope and maintain. Also, if you did switch to the computing model that seems to be suggested by the author (users bringing their own devices, instituion spends on suitible support infrastructure) your spending per actual traditional "workstation" would go up. It does make me wonder what our actual, accurate spend-per-wkrstation is, though, as it does make for a figure you can compare around.

[SpuffMonkey]

Yeah - and I suppose it depends on whether the numerous abandoned but very expensive govt IT projects are factored into the costs - as they really don't add anything to the mix apart from costs paid to outsourcing companies...

[john]

I think maybe the government needs to use its own contracts it sets up, I have used them and fine you need a degree to understand the site but you can call them up and get a really nice idiots guide