After blowing past its budget to spend $96 million dollars on overhauling its website, generating a political pyroclastic cloud, the Bureau of Meteorology can’t end its reliance on its older web portal, iTnews can reveal.
“The new website, the legacy website and the reg.bom.gov.au website (the older portal’s web address) all need to run simultaneously, and it was always planned that they would run simultaneously,” a BoM spokesperson told this publication.
It would seem that Minister for Environment Murray Watt as early as this week was not aware of this plan. At a doorstop press conference the minister held in Brisbane last Sunday he described the overhaul to gathered journalists as a “transition” to a new website.
“I don't think it's any secret that I haven't been happy with the way the BoM has handled its transition to a new website,” Watt said.
In 2019, when Accenture was awarded the contract for the BoM’s digital channels rebuild, then valued at $31 million, iTnews reported that the website was intended to “consolidate and replace the bureau's myriad existing channels”.
Since then, the BoM has never challenged iTnews’ reporting of the matter nor sought to correct the record about its original intent of the project to overhaul the new site and spend tens of millions more on its supporting platforms.
The $96.5 million budget for the overhaul is broken roughly into three parts: $4.1 million was devoted to re-designing its frontend, $79.8 million to its primary channels platform implementation and $12.6 million for its security and testing.
Notably, when iTnews reported that the bureau had finally mastered TLS website security, it said in a statement of the $96.5 million budget for the contract handed to Accenture:
“The bureau's current contract with Accenture is focused on the functional build and support services, however all elements, in combination with expertise and effort of bureau staff, were required to produce and support the new site"
Furthermore, as recently as just over a week ago, iTnews asked the BoM when it planned to switch off the old site and whether it had factored the cost of running the new site and old sites in tandem in its budget projections for the website overhaul.
Arguably, that was an ideal opportunity for the BoM to correct the record. It did not take it, with a BoM spokesperson instead telling iTnews that the switch-off date had not been set “at this stage”.
“At this stage, there is no set date to turn off the ‘legacy’ [the bureau’s emphasis] website. The bureau will gradually move content from the ‘legacy’ [its emphasis again] website to the new website”, the spokesperson said at the time.
When iTnews contacted the BoM to get an update on how much content it had moved from the legacy site to date and to seek details on the cost of running it in tandem with the new website early Thursday, the story changed.
It explained that new portal was not really ever intended to be that new.
“The new website has many new pages but is also a portal through to legacy pages. We will continuously migrate legacy content to new pages over time, as planned,” a BoM spokesperson said.
The bureau then admitted that the old website and its functions would essentially continue to serve as the mainstay for delivering critical weather data to emergency services and other industry sectors that have an existential reliance on it, indefinitely.
“reg.bom.gov.au (the web location of the old service) is a website utilised by emergency services and industry sector customers. This is to enable those services to access specialist data through password protected access. As such, ongoing operation has always been planned,” BoM's spokesperson said.
The spokesperson then appeared to say that the true purpose of the $96 million website overhaul and spend on supporting infrastructure was to make a new portal friendly to mainstream consumers rather than to overhaul its core critical services online portal, reg.bom.gov.au, in any substantial way.
“What has changed is simply the number of users and the user profile,” the spokesperson said.
Watt held the Brisbane doorstop in response to reports of budget overruns for the overhaul ever escalating in seriousness.
The cost was already known to be approximately $86 million, but that number blew out even further to $96.5 million over the weekend of Watt’s impromptu press conference.
As reported by iTnews on Monday, BoM CEO Steve Minchin said the full cost reflected the investment required to “fully rebuild” and test the systems underpinning the website, while making sure it is “secure and stable” and can draw in the huge amounts of data gathered from the bureau’s observing network and weather models.
Watt said that he had asked the BoM chief “as his first priority to make sure that he can get on top of the issues with the website, the functionality.”
However, it would seem that job has been left to the “legacy” site reg.bom.gov.au.
iTnews Executive Retreat - Security Leaders Edition
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