Another £100m up the wall, BBC this time..

[ruggles]

The BBC has axed a £98.4m IT project after the scheme was found to have "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money".

Director-general Tony Hall has decided to end an attempt to create an internal digital archive which has been in progress since 2008.

He said he had "serious concerns" about how the venture was managed and has ordered a review into its failure.

http://news.sky.com/story/1095128/bbc-admits-wasti...



Converting archive into a digital environment, probably missing something but I mean how hard can it be??

[mondeoman]

Get down to PC World and buy a load of 2TB discs, external HD cases, and a bunch of USB cables and hubs, job jobbed

MS Media Center could do the archiving

[bishbash]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/posts/The-B... <- From the horses mouth.

It looks like it's not really the archive that's the issue, it's the infrastructure and tools to put the archive to good use that's the problem.

[Fozziebear]

Monkeys and typewriters comes to mind, I guess they were just hoping on some kind of miracle

[Ozzie Osmond]

I know it's easy to waste money on "systems" but how on earth is it possible to spend £100m without getting anywhere and without realising you're not getting anywhere? These are the kinds of figures more usually associated with military procurement disasters!

[mondeoman]

[quote=Dominic Coles, BBC wallah]
taking disciplinary action where appropriate

[/quote]

Hmmm.....

[bishbash]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Clearly not. From what I've read elsewhere, one of the key ideas behind the project was to allow editors to edit at their desktops using relatively ordinary pc's. They'd do this by using low quality video files, transferred from the data centre, do the editing and then push the edits back to a central render farm for processing on the high quality source files. In theory a nice idea, but it never worked properly. Mainly because the low quality files weren't good enough for the job.

As I say I've only read this from another discussion on the topic on another site, so it's third hand, and may or may not be the case, but it seems to make sense.

[Fozziebear]

Ozzie Osmond said:

I know it's easy to waste money on "systems" but how on earth is it possible to spend £100m without getting anywhere and without realising you're not getting anywhere? These are the kinds of figures more usually associated with military procurement disasters!

Consultants, assistant consultants, systems that are used on other projects that failed, coffee mornings, the list is endless

[Pesty]

mondeoman said:

[quote=Dominic Coles, BBC wallah]
taking disciplinary action where appropriate

Hmmm.....

A couple of massive payouts and huge pensions then.

[HOGEPH]

Fozziebear said:

Consultants, assistant consultants, systems that are used on other projects that failed, coffee mornings, the list is endless

Puts me in mind of the Blackadder line..

G: A thousand pounds? I thought you said it was a...`tuppenny ha'penny' place.

E: Well, yes, sir, the land will cost tuppence-ha'penny, but there are
many other factors to be considered: stamp duty, window tax, swamp
insurance, hen food, dog biscuits, cow ointment -- the expenses are
endless.

[krunchkin]

As someone on the inside I'll give you some insight into this.

The grand idea behind it is to make current material ('rushes") and all the BBC archive searchable and available for download, and for anyone (not just editors in big Avid suites) to be able to perform desk top editing at their PC to some degree with that material.

A comparable system was installed at GMTV around 5 years ago. It's total cost to get up and running was under £3m - it is still working now. Yes - GMTV / Daybreak only produces 3 hours of fresh content a day but that gives you an idea of costs to scale.

Rather than attempt to start from the bottom up and install workflow systems programme by programme, or department to department - using tested proprietry systems by Avid etc as in the GMTV model - the BBC attempted some vastly grand, untested and untried, ludicrously complex (stories of 700 metadata tags per clip), in house grand unifying system. They then sold BBC Technology to Siemens, who fked it up even more, before taking it back in house and fking it up further.

Then someone pointed out that pretty much all broadcasters are now going tapeless/digital by using bought in, tested, systems that are now cheap and affordable as data storage prices continue to plummet

Its an appalling and outrageous pissing away of license money that should have been killed years ago.

[krunchkin]

and remember - just like any big organisation - it's the troops on the ground who end up having to deal with all the st. Your average programme maker at the BBC - i.e the people who actually research, produce, write and direct the stuff you see on screen is about 27 year old, on about 25k a year on a crappy short term contract, and tapping away on some ancient Compaq desktop that is still running Windows XP. Meanwhile the vast swathes of middle management boys in suits on juicy salaries sit around in meetings coming up with bullst like this.

[Ayahuasca]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22651...

But they say they are sorry and will try to ensure it will never happen again so that's OK.

[theboyfold]

I was in the outskirts of this project when it was launched over 6 years ago. We said then it was doomed to fail. This comes as no great shock to me...

[Einion Yrth]

BBC article said:

An independent review has been launched "to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned"

I wonder how much that's going to cost. Hmmmmm

[The Hypno-Toad]

So we now know the real reason why I will be watching only the highlights of the Monaco Grand Prix this weekend....

But not to worry.... Lessons Will Be Learned.

[Ozzie Osmond]

krunchkin said:

Rather than attempt to start from the bottom up and install workflow systems programme by programme, or department to department - using tested proprietry systems by Avid etc as in the GMTV model - the BBC attempted some vastly grand, untested and untried, ludicrously complex (stories of 700 metadata tags per clip), in house grand unifying system. They then sold BBC Technology to Siemens, who fked it up even more, before taking it back in house and fking it up further.

Then someone pointed out that pretty much all broadcasters are now going tapeless/digital by using bought in, tested, systems that are now cheap and affordable as data storage prices continue to plummet

Its an appalling and outrageous pissing away of license money that should have been killed years ago.

That I understand entirely. In the world of procurement I always ask, "Have you seen this thing perform satisfactorily somewhere else? Or at least something similar to it?".

The sheer idiocy of accepting some contractor's word (probably a glossy presentation with full ego massage) that they can invent something from scratch for £x never ceases to amaze.

[Chim]

In the scheme of Guberment IT disasters its fairly small fry. The NHS NPFIT programme that hoped to deliver a unified IT system across the service took 9 years and cost 11 billion. A very cut down version was just leaving final pilot when the tories came in and canned the whole thing.

After supplier legal the final bill is around 13 Billion and they have absolutely fook all to show for it.

[Benny Saltstein]

Ozzie Osmond said:

krunchkin said:

Rather than attempt to start from the bottom up and install workflow systems programme by programme, or department to department - using tested proprietry systems by Avid etc as in the GMTV model - the BBC attempted some vastly grand, untested and untried, ludicrously complex (stories of 700 metadata tags per clip), in house grand unifying system. They then sold BBC Technology to Siemens, who fked it up even more, before taking it back in house and fking it up further.

Then someone pointed out that pretty much all broadcasters are now going tapeless/digital by using bought in, tested, systems that are now cheap and affordable as data storage prices continue to plummet

Its an appalling and outrageous pissing away of license money that should have been killed years ago.

That I understand entirely. In the world of procurement I always ask, "Have you seen this thing perform satisfactorily somewhere else? Or at least something similar to it?".

The sheer idiocy of accepting some contractor's word (probably a glossy presentation with full ego massage) that they can invent something from scratch for £x never ceases to amaze.

I spent five years at the beeb, my final stint being on attachment working on the procurement of a new scheduling system. Just as stated above, rather than going out and buying something proven in the market, they chose to go bespoke.

Because the BBC is so massive, with so many divergent interests and little idea of cost control it's so easy to see how this happens. I left after 18 months because I felt my life slipping away.

[krunchkin]

Chim said:

In the scheme of Guberment IT disasters its fairly small fry. The NHS NPFIT programme that hoped to deliver a unified IT system across the service took 9 years and cost 11 billion. A very cut down version was just leaving final pilot when the tories came in and canned the whole thing.

After supplier legal the final bill is around 13 Billion and they have absolutely fook all to show for it.

A good point - and let's wait to see how well IDS's Grand Unifying Benefits computer system works. Anyone want to take a bet?