Friday, September 01, 2006

The IT costs of the Saville Inquiry

I meant to write a little something about this yesterday but forgot, but apparently the IT costs so far for the "Bloody Sunday" Saville Inquiry are £34.1m. That's £8m more than the enitre BSE Inquiry cost but just on the IT. IThe money has been spent on building an IT system that provides a virtual reality model of the Bogside as it was 30 years ago. Just to clarify, they've spent £34.1m since 1998 playing virtual reality war games.

The scariest thing is that the inquiry is still going on and, depending on which Government minister you speak to, has a total running cost of £100m to £400m (so far), with no obvious end in sight. The next question though is what happens to the bespoke system when the Inquiry closes? I hope they got the hardware on long-term lease.

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