Business Case — the digital estate
Reasons
The estate carries a public record that people rely on, and much of it was built in a few weeks by several workers at once. Without one register, assets go unnoticed when they break (7 addresses were down when this register was first checked), backups are uneven, and privacy slips are hard to catch everywhere at once.
Options
| Option | Summary | Assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Do nothing | Keep building sites ad hoc | Rising risk of silent outages, lost data and privacy leaks |
| Do the minimum | A list of sites only | Shows what exists, not whether it is safe |
| Do something (chosen) | PRINCE2-lite control of the estate: register, registers, stages, reports | Small ongoing cost; makes every later change safer |
Expected benefits
- Every asset known, owned (by role) and status-checked.
- Faster recovery: each site rebuildable from Git or a recorded export.
- Privacy protected across all sites by one check.
- Independence: the public record survives the loss of any single platform.
- Lower hosting waste (e.g. wasted preview builds removed on 19 Oct 2026).
Expected dis-benefits
- Some time spent on records rather than new content.
- Change control slows quick fixes slightly.
Timescale
Stages S0–S3, 19 October to 30 November 2026 (see stage plans).
Costs
Hosting stays on free plans except the existing paid storage. Possible small costs, each needing the Executive’s approval: an archive.org account is free; a larger hosted-wiki plan or paid hosting only if a limit is hit.
Major risks
See the Risk Register: single accounts, backups, privacy, rate limits, credential rotation, disk space on the worker machine.