*Jozzua Notes from a Business and Marketing Strategist/Tactician

The 20-Million-Peso DOST Website Scam?

This news article makes people go 'woah?!':

The One-Stop-Information Shop of Technologies in the Philippines is an online database of over 280 technologies, inventions, and process improvements that can be used by small-to-medium scale businesses, manufacturing operators and other industries.

The OSIST project cost P20 million and was funded through the e-Government fund of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

Just read what my twitter buddies Jason and Joel says about it:

jasontorres: "The OSIST project cost P20 million" - and that site is freaking slow! and ugh, 20 Megabucks for the website??? isn't that scam-ish.

joelsantiago: ... Really, though, for something with a budget - even at just a fraction of the 20M - pinoys can do and have done much better.

Why does it look scam-ish? Well, for people who are in the internet industry, we have a fairly good idea of how much projects like these cost. Based on the article, it's simply an online database of entrepreneurs.

The One-Stop-Information Shop of Technologies in the Philippines is an online database of over 280 technologies, inventions, and process improvements that can be used by small-to-medium scale businesses, manufacturing operators and other industries.

What would you need for something like that? Here's what I can tell you, I've been with teams that developed similar applications and we needed:
- An powerful server that can handle millions of requests per second
- A database software back-end like MySQL
- A development software framework (PHP in CakePhp or maybe in Ruby on Rails)
- A team of at least three developers working on it for 3-6 months.

Let's breakdown how much this would possibly cost (let's go for the most expensive we can think of):
- Server(say we get virtual hosting for 10 years): $100 a month x 12 month x 10 years = $12,000
- MySQL: $600
- PHP: Open-source so it's free.
- Five developers paid $2000 pesos in 12 months (let's go extreme): $24,000

For a total budget of $36,000. Let's convert this into Philippine peso at 50 Pesos per dollar at this would be Php 1,830,000 (Almost 2 Million!).

Given my estimates, something must be wayyyyy offff in my computations. 2M is a mere 10% of 20M. Perhaps DOST bought it's own mainframe for this. Maybe they used an oracle database. I don't know. Until we see the actual cost breakdown, all we can do is speculate.

Why pay P20 Million?

It appears some of us still live in a generation where you can get away with selling overpriced software applications. I can just imagine it:

The project manager proposes a 12 month development time. Business documents analysis will take three months. Technical specifications analysis will take another three months. (No, they haven't begun coding yet, they need all the DOCUMENTS first - you know to be thorough). The design of the front end user interface with take one month. After that, they will have 5 months left of development time. But that's just phase 1. Still, that's already worth 10 Million Pesos.

In the meantime, some other smaller company made the same software in three months.

Maybe THAT is the business case here? Sell the IDEA first to the government. The proposal itself would cost 20 Million. Then get some small company to work on it for 2 Million.

If it is, then I bow to the selling skills of the seller.

Unfortunately, the tax paying public (like me) paid for that web site. Now I blog about this so that hopefully next time I will have a SAY on things that I will pay for.

You should blog about it too! We're the new power block, remember?