Leadership in bits

The National Audit Office's progress report on the BBC's digital transformation takes plenty of sideswipes at the quality of decision making at the top of the organisation.  Newspaper summaries of the report have chosen to highlight the comparative low level of investment in digital development, but the NAO is very critical of the management of what has been spent so far. Here's some bits: 

We have, for example, only seen limited evidence that the BBC’s executive committee is providing sufficient challenge to its digital leaders....

While the BBC has started to develop plans for how it could personalise some of its individual digital products and services, we have yet to see evidence that it has begun work on pulling together a comprehensive strategy for personalisation across the organisation....

The BBC was due to start developing its personalisation strategy in July 2021, following completion of work on its sign-in strategy, but by November 2022 we had yet to see evidence that the BBC has started this work....

In May 2022, the BBC announced a £500 million plan, in support of its ‘digital-first’ plans. Included in this was its expectation that by 2025 it will invest approximately £50 million extra annually in digital product development. The BBC has an internal plan in place to support this investment, but this currently lacks the detail necessary for taking it forward....

In reviewing BBC planning documents on using customer data we found no references to its approach to the management and mitigation of reputational and other potential risks that could arise as it increases its use of such data ....

...evidence we have seen of interactions between DLG [the BBC's new Digital Leadership Group] and the executive committee suggests that these interactions have taken place on a more ad hoc basis than originally planned....

As of September 2022, 88% of the time that BBC audiences spent with its services was through traditional television and radio broadcasting....

It currently uses the same production infrastructure to distribute content for both its broadcast television and digital online channels. This means that in practice there may not be straightforward savings to be found from simply closing linear broadcasting channels...

It is clear the BBC has taken value for money into consideration in individual procurement decisions related to the maintenance of its critical national infrastructure. However, it was not apparent to us that it regularly evaluates its overall resilience arrangements to establish where it can make further efficiencies.

In July 2022, the BBC... noted that metadata was still managed very differently across different parts of the organisation.