Tools

Some bits and bobs from yesterday's NAO report on what went wrong with the BBC's Digital Media Initiative....

184 staff and contractors were working on the project at its peak in July 2011 - that doesn't include consultants.  Things were clearly a bit frantic then, cos the project risk status had gone from "Amber" to "Amber/Red" in June - that change of status wasn't reported up to the Executive and Trust Finance committee for more than two months.

When the project first went to "Red", in December 2011, neither the Trust nor the Executive received the report; the second straight "Red", came in March 2012, but wasn't reported to the Executive til June, and the Trust til July. Red meant "successful delivery outcomes appeared to be unachievable, with major issues that did not appear to be manageable or resolvable."

The NAO report says there are three principal "assets" left from the investment - an archive database, which apparently costs £5.3m a year to operate, and which is working alongside a legacy system costing £780k a year to run; some big digital data storage units, which the BBC might use for its "End To End Digital" project (storage of the entire BBC archive will be on a USB stick by the time that works); and a music copyright reporting system, which, as of December 2013, had five users.

John Linwood, the CTO who left Auntie in July last year, says the core of his troubles with the project was that the "business" (television production teams) got cold feet about moving to standardised production tools for the rough assembly of built programmes before fine-editing. Cancelling this fundamental ambition in 2012 (when naughty tv teams knew DG Thommo was going, and had taken his eye off the standardisation prize) meant there could be no organic growth of an archive; Linwood says the digitisation of the BBC's historic archive was never part of DMI scope. His written evidence to the PAC says he's issued legal proceedings against the BBC, and (as of January 23) is still involved in an internal process with the BBC.

The key element of the NAO report, which I expect Ma Hodge to wave at former DG Mark Thompson next week: The executive board applied insufficient scrutiny during 2011 and the first half of 2012. This was, of course, the period when Thommo was buffing up his CV ahead of a new, post-Olympic career outside Auntie, and DMI, along with other more damaging issues, went straight into the "Too Difficult" tray.