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podcast : on THE Radio4 Media Show BBC
(Digital media Intiative - Don't Mention It) It's supposed to be like an internal BBCIplayer so BBC staff can quickly access the entire archive of the BBC recordings chapter by chapter.
- The Media Show prog carried an allegation that the "BBC team lied to the >BBC Trust", cos the top boss Mark Thompson (head of NYT now) 2 years ago said the project was OK and some progs had already been made with it. This seems not to be true and the head of IT has been suspended on full pay
- I wonder what happened ? I used to work in project management - the trick is to write the project specification very clearly, that way after you award the contract the contractor cannot increase the price. This falls apart when you change your mind later.
This is what happened with the a monumental project failure the Air Traffic Contol System Swanwick project (£600m over budget & 6 years late)
a list of 30 failed UK IT projects
- WHY IT's not really a £96m cost for nothing; I have a few theories.
- 1. It's not a total loss, cos surely the experience and equipment gained
can be used in other ways . For a start when they buy in an off the self
LIBRARY system they will have the expertise to buy it & implement it more
quickly.
- 2. When you have a loss making project you can some accountancy tricks. I
bet this is what happened . If a department is running over budget they
simply book extra stuff to the basket case project, cos no one will notice due to it being a basket case already. You can book every office party cos down to that project etc.
- Whether it's £50m or £100m the BBC system has lost money and that is due to some managers not doing their job properly, so they should not have been paid bonuses and some of that money needs to be clawed back.
- SHOULD have begun SIMPLE : My guess is that the people who wrote the specification had no idea of the real world, and didn't appreciate the complexity. The Iplayer is one thing, but that is one level : standard quality & whole programmes, but Pre-broadcast quality chapter by chapter is a much higher level. I bet they didn't appreciate the level of storage and bandwidth you need to implement that. What they should have done is built up from a small level; starting with radio. Start with one local radio station, and set up so everyone can share their own audio. Then move up to do that at a regional level (Scotland or Wales) , then move up to national. But did DMI start trying to TV at national level from the beginning ? There seems to be one industry that has implemented mass storage and thumbnailing of videos ..maybe the contractors spend too much time researching it (Adult video sites)
Another BBC IT Fiasco - BBC had contracted Autonomy to make software which quickly indexes video content. That one was implemented in 2006 After the Autonomy FIASCO when it was bought by HP (going from a $4bn to $zero company)
one of the few projects held up as a good example of working was the BBC Monitoring's Technology Refresh Project, aka "Socrates" ..What happened to that ? Ah abandoned as a total failure £8.3m written off April 2013.
- Maybe the BBC has the best IT people making the programmes instead of
implementing the IT
- There is a BBC version of I-tunes in the pipeline Project Barcelona... will they finlly make some money back on that ?
Now it's called BBC Store it has still not launched ..and Sky TV has beaten them to is as it has just launched Sky Store
BBC should be ready soon ..as they are recruiting "BBC Store is being launched in spring 2015"
here is a summary from Oct 2013
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