When you are tackling a new Drupal migration, sometimes it is useful to have reference points for what other projects have gone though. For that, I've scrutinized the case studies, the Acquia examples, and everything else I could find. However what I'm not finding much data on is what various Drupal migration projects (for government) have cost, or are projected to cost. In this era of "Open Government" this data should be as accessible as the stories of all the great new features that Drupalized government sites have--the data is in the public record after all.
I realize that costs vary from geography to geography even for the same skill, and projects vary depending on the scale of the website. I'm going to account for part of that scale by dividing the cost by the number of residents in the jurisdiction, and am trying to incorporate other site scale aspects into my comparison.
Here's the only data points I've found so far (and I'm aiming for more city/county/regional agencies than states):
- City of Austin, TX is going through a website redesign as well as migrating to Drupal. "Total cost will be from $500k to $900k." http://openaustin.posterous.com/matthews-coa-website-will-be-done-in-hou...
- City of Memphis TN is redesigning its website and migrating to Drupal.
The project is just getting underway. Their budget is $252,000, and the goal is to launch in May 2012.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/city-wide-web/Content?oid=3070694 - The State of Georgia is migrating to Drupal from Vignette. The RFP was awarded to Phase 2 Technology for $3.1M. http://govfresh.com/2011/09/georgia-gov-has-drupal-on-its-mind/
Do you know of additional data points? I'm especially interested in cities or counties between 500,000 and 2M residents.
erik
Comments
Cost for Local Government Website Installations will vary
We have completed about thirty Drupal local government website projects in the United States (city, county, school district, and other local government agencies) across fifteen states. The pricing can vary greatly depending on the size of the local government agency and the scope of work required. Only the largest municipal projects reach the six figure range. For most cities and counties, a solid website redesign project (requirements, custom design, implementation, training, testing, deployment) can occur for much less.
All of the Drupal municipal websites shown here (www.ahaconsulting.com/portfolio) were completed for much less than the figures you mentioned for those state and federal agencies. Most of these projects were won via an open, competitive bid process against some of the top proprietary municipal government website providers out there. Drupal's functionality has allowed us to offer a superior set of features and usability, while at the same time remain price competitive.
e3g - Feel free to contact me if you want some more details regarding cost ranges you might expect based on the size of local government agency and a typical project scope. These local government agencies have a smaller population set than what you are looking for (under 100,000 population), but you still might find the data interesting.
Brian Gilday
Municode
www.municode.com
Free, plus services.
Earlier this year we launched AchieveCity.com which is intended to make it free. We do this by working from the Phase2 OpenPublic distribution, extended with a bunch of extra local government features that we constructed, and have so far put a few sites live, cityofmanor.org was the first of these to go live and some in the UK have followed, with a number more being under construction right now. This makes it possible for us to make free, and host for free with no lock-in. We also give a some theming and assistance service, for as long as it takes us to work out how to build a wizard for the process. This works fine for an individual agency or a small city, but for bigger cities and states it is inevitably going to be a bigger project.
Implementing CMS is a lot of work, and often that is a reflection of change management, design, and managing all stakeholders, in addition to the technical work. My experience to date is that the human element still costs about the same regardless of which CMS you are using, and that the technical parts are no harder in Drupal than in other technologies. Drupal has a great community, lots of readily available modules, good distributions as a starting point, no vendor lock-in, and is generally a positive move, compared to other viable alternatives.