BoM reveals plan to fix website within six months

The Bureau of Meteorology says it will take six months to address the deluge of community outrage its new $96.5 million website has generated after surpassing its budget to build the portal.

During a parliamentary hearing yesterday, BoM chief executive Stuart Minchin rejected suggestions that the bureau was working to bring the site’s standards into line with its legacy site.

However, he conceded that some users had found some parts of the new site “difficult” to use and that the bureau was planning a series of site and app updates that will begin within months.

“We hope the website updates will never finish. As new information and new products come on board, we will continue developing the website, but we are hoping to address most of the major tranches of concern in releases over the next six months,” Minchin said.

Among the improvements that Minchin flagged were changes that would allow the site’s users to isolate their weather forecasts by postcode.

He also flagged the bureau’s intention to make changes to the site’s radar mapping visualisations provided through on website.

Minchin was responding to questions from the parliamentary committee about the loss of topographic and geographic geospatial information previously visible using the legacy site’s radar maps.

Minchin said BoM would change the site’s weather radar maps to show their true diagnostic reach, bringing then into line with the Android and Apple iOS versions of its app.

However, whatever user experience improvements it makes, BoM can’t escape its reliance on the older “legacy” site and, as iTnews reported, it has conceded it never intended to do so.

The “tranches of concern” to which Minchin referred was a tsunami of dissatisfaction among many users that relied heavily on the old site for their livelihoods and the subsequent media storm that followed, landing squarely on the bureau’s heads.

Public resentment grew as it started to feed on increasingly inflammatory media coverage of the extent to which the bureau had overspent on the site.

Often the reports were misleading, as the bureau struggled to communicate the quantum of the website’s cost as a discreet component of its $866 million ROBUST program of works, creating the spectre of a blow-out in the order of hundreds-of-millions of dollars.

The bureau has since conceded a cost overrun for the site in the order of around $10 million after confirming the final bill for the site overhaul at $96.5 million, which superseded previous reports that the cost would be $86.6 million or around 10 percent of the total spend on ROBUST.

However, the bureau’s initial estimate put the cost of the site at $31 million when it first published the tender for the work in August 2019, a figure frequently used as a reference point as a measure of overrun.

Late last year the bureau told parliament that it was unfair to characterise the additional cost as a case of “land and expand” by IT contractors, particularly its lead contractor for ROBUST, Accenture.

The bureau said it intentionally requested extra work as initial scoping for the website overhaul uncovered system complexities that it hadn’t contemplated.

History, it would appear, has repeated itself with the new website’s user experience performance.

“We always knew that there would be fixes that would be required. What probably caught the bureau a little bit unaware … was the extent of the feedback that we received and we're working through that very actively,” Minchin told the committee.