How Not to Update Your I.T Systems – BBC Blunders

Keeping Your I.T Systems Up To Date

When you’re running a business, it’s always important to keep your I.T services up to date. Without an up to date system your business could be in danger of become out of date, out of touch with new technology and, most dangerous of all, falling behind your competitors. Having the right technology for your business is essential and depending on what business you’re in, you’ll need different types of equipment. For example, if you’re working in an office managing financial accounts it’s likely that you’re only going to need enough computers for your team, a decent internet connection and a file storage system to keep everything organised.

However, if you’re working in a more creative industry where you need up to date software that performs a number of complex and intricate processes, such as the production of a television show or movie, you’re going to need quite a lot of technology to get the job done. The process of keeping such complex and expensive technology up to date is a big one, and one recently undertaken by the BBC with, quite frankly disastrous results.

A five year project which attempted to digitise the huge broadcasting archive and make the public funded company completely ‘tapeless’ came to an end last month with the total cost amounting to a massive £100 million. The result of this hugely expensive process was complete failure.  The BBC is a widely loved part of British culture, the broadcasting company has brought the counties most iconic moments to living rooms via television and radio since 1922, and this failure is set to become a great big black mark against the name of arguably the biggest broadcasting company across the world. So what happened? For a project such as this to try and update the IT systems at the BBC to go on for so long, cost so much and achieve so little is a massive blunder for a publically funded organisation to make.

The Digital media initiative (DMI) was supposed to shorten the link between the production systems of the BBC and the BBC archive, which houses all the productions, recordings and broadcasts made by BBC since its creation.  What this would allow programme makers to do is rather than walk about the hundreds and thousands of hours of tapes in the BBC storage centre looking for the right piece of footage or sound bite to put into a show, they could simply use and internal search engine, download the snipped of recording that they need and input it in to a new news broadcast or show.

Although the idea was simple enough and the benefits of a working system would be obvious (it was estimated that the DMI system would half the individual video-handling processes from 70 to 35) it soon became totally out of hand. The project was simply too big and too complicated for the company to content with.

Such was the size and difficulty of this task, after just 24 months the DMI was 21 months behind schedule, but it wasn’t until the death of Margaret Thatcher that the incentive really began to fall apart at the seams. The death of the Iron Lady sent the media world into an utter frenzy as news broadcasters from around the globe sought out old footage of the Mrs Thatcher in her prime to lament or pass comment on the type of lady she was and what she had done (good and bad) for Great Britain. Now who would have all this old footage in a brand new digitally enhanced system? The BBC of course.  The digital system though, completely failed. Producers and BBC workers were forced to ferry tapes and pieces of archived footage via the tube and in taxis across london due to the ineptitude of the system.

Business owners everywhere have had their toes permanently curled at the sight of this story. Such a huge amount of money has been wasted on a much needed IT system that has completely fallen on its face. The BBC’s chief technology officer has taken most of the flak for this mishap and has now been ‘temporarily replaced’ while his replacement tried to pick up the pieces and wipe egg off the BBC’s face as the British government seeks to find out how a publically funded institution could waste so much licence payers money and have nothing to show for it in the end. It should serve as a lesson for all those looking to integrate business IT services and update their systems that the proper research should be done before throwing money at a problem.

Thanks for reading. Please do check out the rest of my work on Instructables. I would particularly recommend "Understanding The Intricacies Of Industry".

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