So the much maligned Recovery.gov Web site went live on 9/28 to mostly positive reviews.

The new site provide a lot of information in very engaging formats, including an interactive map and variety of reporting tools on how the Recovery Act money is being spent. It’s also a clean, organized and highly usable Web site. Federal Computer Week ran a nice piece on the site launch.

Yet, as someone who has been running a Web development firm for 11+ years, I still can’t connect the dots on how it could possibly cost $9.5 million to build. Even though it is a large, complex site, with a lot of back-end integration, a sophisticated and highly customized CMS, and significant hardware/hosting infrastructure, not to mention an aggressive roll-out (I think the site was built in 4 or 5 months), the price tag still seems way too steep.

Let’s look at it this way – assuming a $200/hr blended rate, and subtracting a healthy $1 million for hardware and software, that works out to roughly 42,500 man-hours. Assuming a 5 month timeline, that represents 8,500 man-hours per month, or 53 FTEs dedicated to the project. There is no way 53 full-time, 100% dedicated / utilized individuals were required to build this site. No way.

Kudos to Smartronix for making a lot money in 2009!

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• Melissa Hart says:

  October 3, 2009 at 9:11 pm

  In light of this, I find the red button in the top, right, corner labeled “Report Fraud, Waste & Abuse” on the Recovery.gov website particularly of interest.