Australia Spent $62 Million To Update Its Weather Web Site and Made It Worse (bbc.com) 71
quonset writes: Australia last updated their weather site a decade ago. In October, during one of the hottest days of the year, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) revealed its new web site and was immediately castigated for doing so. Complaints ranged from a confusing layout to not being able to find information. Farmers were particularly incensed when they found out they could no longer input GPS coordinates to find forecasts for a specific location. When it was revealed the cost of this update was A$96.5 million ($62.3 million), 20 times the original cost estimate, the temperature got even hotter.
With more than 2.6 billion views a year, Bom tried to explain that the site's refresh -- prompted by a major cybersecurity breach in 2015 -- was aimed at improving stability, security and accessibility. It did little to satisfy the public. Some frustrated users turned to humour: "As much as I love a good game of hide and seek, can you tell us where you're hiding synoptic charts or drop some clues?"
Malcolm Taylor, an agronomist in Victoria, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the redesign was a complete disaster. "I'm the person who needs it and it's not giving me the information I need," the plant and soil scientist said. As psychologist and neuroscientist Joel Pearson put it, "First you violate expectations by making something worse, then you compound the injury by revealing the violation was both expensive and avoidable. It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion."
With more than 2.6 billion views a year, Bom tried to explain that the site's refresh -- prompted by a major cybersecurity breach in 2015 -- was aimed at improving stability, security and accessibility. It did little to satisfy the public. Some frustrated users turned to humour: "As much as I love a good game of hide and seek, can you tell us where you're hiding synoptic charts or drop some clues?"
Malcolm Taylor, an agronomist in Victoria, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the redesign was a complete disaster. "I'm the person who needs it and it's not giving me the information I need," the plant and soil scientist said. As psychologist and neuroscientist Joel Pearson put it, "First you violate expectations by making something worse, then you compound the injury by revealing the violation was both expensive and avoidable. It's the government IT project equivalent of ordering a renovation, discovering the contractor has made your house less functional, and then learning they charged you for a mansion."
There is a word for that (Score:1)
Re: There is a word for that (Score:3)
"Throughing", also known as "feeding at the public through".
Re:There is a word for that (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wait, Australia actually has a competent national weather bureau? I always thought the function of the government-run weather bureau was to function as the lowest-common-denominator that everything else was better than.
That's a genuine question, it's just natural to assume that the national weather authority for any country is pretty bad.
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Yes, Australia has a good weather bureau. As do most countries. The corporate sites people love to quote get their data and forecasts from the national bureau's, and dress it up with slightly better eye candy. Only the national weather bureau's have weather monitoring stations distributed around the country, and the supercomputers needed to make the forecasts.
Australia is unusual in one way: most people do get their data from the Australia's BOM (Bureau of Meteorology). The web old site was rock solid,
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weather.gov went through its own overhaul. https://www.weather.gov/redesi... [weather.gov]
Way more compute power required to provide the same service.
Oracle must be somehow (Score:1)
...involved
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Or SAP.
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It was Accenture (AUD$78m) with a side dish of Deloittes (AUD$35m).
It's called corruption (Score:1)
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This is precisely what I assume as well. How does something run 20x over budget...
Sounds like California's high speed train to no where. I'm sure it's making someone rich and that someone is almost certainly well connected.
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Re: It's called corruption (Score:4, Informative)
How? (Score:2)
Re:How? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: How? (Score:2)
Re: How? (Score:4, Funny)
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I believe that there is no limit to the incompetence of government committee.
We've formed a committee to limit the levels of incompetence in the previous committee.
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For that sort of wasteful spending I'd make an intentionally bad website that is sure to require additional funding and more billable hours just to bring it back to how it already was. Doing a good job within a reasonable agreed-upon budget is the worst possible way to make money as a consultant.
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Committees can convolutize anything. Some mamby pamby or non-IT manager won't say "no" and so every feature requests ends up in the spec, making a mess. Good managers know when to say "no".
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That's precisely the thinking that can put you in the situation of massively overspending. You made an assumption without ever even looking at the requirements. Your project is doomed from the onset simply because of your approach or view of the situation.
In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score:5, Interesting)
It's nuts. The muppet in the hot seat, Bureau CEO Stuart Minchin, cited switching from HTTP to HTTPS as one of the main points during one of the regular grillings he has been getting from the media over the past few weeks, because apparently the data of Australians was on the line. On a website which requires precisely zero PII, or even general information (short of location) to use. Unless a giant infrastructure also went ahead in the background (like, from the feed horns on the radar back) it makes no sense if you're not living in the pork barrel yourself. If that did in fact happen, they need to fire whoever is in charge of their PR.
Meanwhile, just for shits and giggles, at least three consultancy firms have come out with their own versions of the front end which are objectively better in all regards than this new piece of junk, just to demonstrate how hard web dev isn't.
Gotta justify your budget somehow I guess.
Re:In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score:5, Informative)
The muppet in the hot seat, Bureau CEO Stuart Minchin, cited switching from HTTP to HTTPS as one of the main points during one of the regular grillings he has been getting from the media over the past few weeks, because apparently the data of Australians was on the line.
On a decent web host, that's a single click to install a free Let's Encrypt certificate, lol.
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The old images were from radars that did 6 elevations with a sweep time of a minute per elevation. So rather than put the data in a continuous 6 minute buffer, they throw all the data away every 6 minutes and start over.
They could have bought a system from a number of groups for far less money. There are even TV stations that would have sold them a world class system for a few million dollars. That would be a turnkey system that can take feeds from all the existing radars plus any of the newer coastal rad
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at least three consultancy firms have come out with their own versions of the front end
One of the problems here is legacy. There's an insane volume of information on the BOM websites dumped in a very simple way. Many years of lack of an API has created all sorts of interesting ways people use and access the data.
Making a front end is easy. Making a front end that doesn't break someone's workflow is virtually impossible, even for sites much smaller.
Honestly their best bet would be a parallel system. Make and app, register the domain bom2.gov.au and set up shop there. Then monitor how the old s
I feel that appropriate vetting didn't happen. (Score:2)
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are you a certified viber? how many certifications would we be talking about?
Re: I feel that appropriate vetting didn't happen. (Score:1)
Could AI provide a natural language front end to improve the site?
Re: I feel that appropriate vetting didn't happen. (Score:2)
Heard in UAT (Score:2)
She'll be right mate!
So they took a working website (Score:2)
So they took a website that was working just fine and spent a kabillion dollars to make it significantly worse.
I'm sure everyone here will agree when I say that I've definitely never heard of something like this ever happening before. Never ever.
Re: So they took a working website (Score:1)
Why does youtube come to mind?
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So they took a website that was working just fine
Found the guy who doesn't own a mobile phone. No there's nothing fine about the BOM website. It flat out doesn't work on the device most people use to get weather information. Forget mobile site, it doesn't even format existing text to make it readable on a small screen.
The BOM website is truly a national embarrassment, especially in a country that is so often hit by floods, fires, and tropical storms.
Yeah but at least the front fall didn't off. (Score:4, Funny)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
Par for the course (Score:2)
"Redesigns" often make things worse. Designers are given free reign, users come in a distant last.
Incremental improvements are more likely to make things better.
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Free rein. As in the thing used to control a horse.
Re: Par for the course (Score:1)
Can you see how "free reign" makes sense though, because the designers get their way kind of like a king?
Does "mute point" make your blood boil, too, despite the common sense factor?
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Free rein. As in the thing used to control a horse.
Well gee; that just totally obviates my point, lol
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Joel on software, long ago, wrote an article about why you should never do a rewrite. You should always evolve the existing. While obviously the rule shouldn't be absolute (there are times when a rewrite needs to be done), it ought to be very rare. Old software is very often good software. Most major bugs have been fixed, a lot of minor ones too. What doesn't work can usually be solved by evolving the software (sometimes including major surgery to underlying components). Use cases are lost to the new design
Re: Par for the course (Score:2)
Just government doing what government does! (Score:2)
restore old site? (Score:2)
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The have the old site at reg.bom.gov.au
Older 64km Radar Loop near Melbourne [bom.gov.au]
Re: restore old site? (Score:1)
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When you ask people to vote for change vs no change they will vote for the latter regardless of how good the former. The problem there is that you will perpetually maintain two systems.
People hate change. All change. Even if the new website was perfect people will vote for what they know.
It's the government IT project equivalent of... (Score:2)
Having sat I don't know how many times in a room waiting to have my government credentials renewed while the government IT on this side of the Pacific was living up to its expectations, I am somewhat relieved to again be reminded that the United States did not invent stupid. But I am somewhat dismayed that we appear to have competition in perfecting it.
reg.bom.gov.au (Score:3)
As far as I am concerned, all they did was move the web site from bom.gov.au to reg.bom.gov.au, which is where the entire old web site is still available. And thanks for moving this to https, it was long overdue.
As for the new site - I can't find anything, or make anything work.
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I'm also a user of reg.bom.gov.au, but that is not the same as the old version that you used to see by going to the home page bom.gov.au until recently. It's also not the new version that you see now. Oh and by the way, reg.bom.gov.au used to also have a non-https version hosted at beta.bom.gov.au, but that one now redirects to the new "canonical" version (not the reg. one). So confusing. Just for the records, the reg. one is my favourite UI. I have no idea why they went through so many versions, only to se
Re: shocking (Score:1)
Same tax fraud corruption in our country (Score:2)
Not that bad, not the whole story. (Score:3)
Modern websites (Score:5, Interesting)
Usually there's a huge title header that takes up two-thirds of the vertical length of your viewport, and there's no way to enumerate the content of the site, because all you get are vague links ("your municipality", "services for you", "house and environment"). In the end you have to use Google to search for anything, which can land you to an old, unindexed page that is no longer the current one for whatever you were looking for. This is especially true because another thing with modern websites is that URLs tend to be meaningless or short-lived, because sites are either "single page" or served by a CMS that changes every six months.
Finally, the concept of vertical scrolling is broken by useless, unusable tricks such as endless scroll or, for front pages, something fancier that makes the site look like a children's pop-up book (all of this coming from the same people who in the 90s told us that <blink> was a crime against humanity).
Maybe it's because of the "mobile-first" design of modern websites, but I don't think so, because typically the mobile version of said sites is even less functional, with everything that can't be easily implemented as a scrollable sequence of short text sentences being painful to use or just missing.
Not the full story (Score:2)
this isn't just about the public web site (Score:5, Informative)
I have some inside knowledge. This mess up goes back a long way. About 10 years back the bureau realised they had a major security problem. Bad actors could get into the bureau's systems and mess things up pretty badly. Security is important because people's lives depend on weather being predicted accurately. Think aircraft, ships, flooding, fire, the whole bit.
To their credit they decided to do something about it, and getting money to fix it wasn't an issue, the government was on side. To their discredit, what they decided to do was hire some consultants to tell them how to fix it instead of asking their own people, giving their own people training in how to do security or integrating people with security expertise into their existing teams. The consultants said start again. All their systems, not just the public facing web site which is a small proportion of their IT.
They ridiculously and obscenely underestimated how long it would take to start again. They hired a whole department of new people under new managers who knew nothing about weather and made no workable attempt to integrate this department into their existing power structures. Their existing people were sidelined, respected middle managers were pushed aside, the shop floor was told not to complain upwards because it would only make extra work for the middle managers and nothing would be achieved. So of course their best people got pissed off and some of them left. Of course the public would not be aware of any of this nonsense until this ridiculous new web site was made available, created by people who had little of the bureau's existing expertise.
Documentary (Score:2)
I think I saw a documentary [youtube.com] about this a while back...
most improved websites (Score:2)
Most websites from large organizations that have been "improved" are usually much worse after being improved. There are a few reasons, imo. One is that management wants the same code to be sufficient for all devices, thus making it a loser on all devices. Next is that the bosses love tons of mouse-overs, clever little featurelets, and give the job to graphic designers who want to make it pretty with pastel colors, low contrast type, yet have zero understanding of user model.