‘Didn’t get it right’: BOM defends website cost blowout
The head of the Bureau of Meteorology admits the agency failed to properly implement its controversial website overhaul but defends the huge cost blowout.
The bureau’s director general, Stuart Minchin, faced a row at a late-night Senate estimates hearing on Monday after the agency came under increasing pressure to redesign its website.
The original price tag of the modification was $ 4.1 million, but it later turned out to be $ 96 million.
The bureau’s website, one of the most visited in Australia, has also faced criticism that it is not user-friendly and does not properly display the severity of storms.
Dr Minchin said the website redesign was part of a wider $866 million security and technology upgrade at the bureau dating back to 2015, with cost blowouts blamed on Covid-19 and inflation.
“This cost reflects a significant investment required to completely rebuild all layers of technology and systems that support the website, which we need to ensure that the website is secure, stable, and able to pull in large amounts of data collected from our observation network,” he said at the hearing.
“But the response to the launch of the new BOM website shows that we are not getting it right for some sections of the community.
“We welcome this feedback, and I have personally seen firsthand how committed the office staff is to understanding and addressing this feedback.”
Although there have been calls from users of the website to bring back the old version, Dr Minchin said the previous version was not bug-free.
“I don’t accept that the old website was perfect. The old website was well known to people, but there were a lot of improvements that needed to be made. It was also unsafe,” Dr Minchin said.
“The previous website that everyone loved was actually not accessible to many people in the community. For example, it was not fully meeting the needs of visually impaired people who relied on text readers to read.
“There were 70,000 web pages in it, and most of them used language you would have to have a PhD to understand.”
Greens senator Barbara Pocock said cost explosions were a nightmare.
“As a case study of how not to do something really important. We need to learn that lesson,” he said.
“This project was a nightmare, a Harvard case study in contract failure and the management of contracts, leadership failure and the completely unacceptable and unethical behavior of very large consultants who were brought to the bottom through the BOM.
“There is a huge feed into the public sector by big consulting firms.”
Environment Minister Murray Watt said lessons had been learned from the cost overrun in redesigning the website and rolling it out to the public.
“There are some questions about how this project was managed. I think a lot of that predates Dr. Minchin’s arrival,” Senator Watt said.
“This could be a contract that demonstrates the need for more oversight, consultants and greater use of public sector capacity wherever possible.”
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