ABS parked broader M365 Copilot trial due to 'significant' Lotus Notes legacy

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) abstained from the recent government-wide Copilot trial, because much of its information is still stored in Lotus Notes, meaning Copilot could not access it.

The bureau's CTO Craig Lindenmayer told iTnews that a “significant portion” of the ABS’ information and records are currently stored in HCL Notes, formerly known as IBM Lotus Notes, “making them inaccessible to Microsoft Copilot”.

As such, the ABS did not take part in the Digital Transformation Agency’s six-month trial of Copilot for M365 that ended June 30.

In a submission to an inquiry into the use of AI in the public sector, the ABS said it “understands that information management and access is a key enabler for the success of AI”.

"Given the ABS is only in the early stages of migrating its information holdings from HCL Notes to Microsoft SharePoint, there are [fewer] potential benefits from a broader scale trial [of Copilot]," it said.

The ABS elected to run a smaller-scale test of Copilot "to better understand how the technology can extract more value within our ICT environment and to explore associated risks,” Lindenmayer added.

It also allows staff to use Microsoft Copilot in the Edge browser.

The ABS' experience is similar to other participants in the DTA trial, where some departments and agencies struggled to get adoption and usage, because Copilot could not connect to information systems that staff used.

The bureau adopted Lotus Notes and HCL Domino for its workflow, messaging, knowledge repositories, subscription business intelligence services integration, records management and web content management in the 1990s.

iTnews understands that the tools are still used for collaboration, information management, corporate services and statistical production.

According to Lindenmayer, due to the number of systems hosted on Notes, the ABS will continue to maintain its Notes and Domino platform while "exploring options to modernise its systems”.

“This includes a combination of migrating to SharePoint, transitioning to SaaS platforms, reengineering to cloud-native solutions, or updating systems on the HCL platform,” he said.

Lindenmayer added that the ABS is also “exploring potential solutions” that could enable Copilot to access Notes data, such as using a third-party connector.