According to "Broadband TV News" here (By Julian Glover).


"The BBC has dropped a £100 million project to digitise its production systems and suspended its chief technology officer John Linford.
The Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which would have enabled all BBC production staff to effectively create programmes from their desktops, had been suspended last autumn. Established in 2008, it had been viewed as a key plank in the way digital video was shared around the corporation in the light of the move of programmes such as Breakfast and Blue Peter to the new facility in Salford, Greater Manchester.
The contract to deliver the technology solution for DMI was originally awarded to Siemens and brought back in-house to the BBC by mutual agreement.
A total of £98.4 million was spent on the project, which BBC director-general Tony Hall said had ”wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money” and promised an investigation by the BBC Trust."


The BBC News web-site (here) reports:-

"The BBC has scrapped a £98m digital production system, which its director general said had "wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers' money".

The Digital Media Initiative was set up in 2008 but was halted last autumn having never become fully operational.

"I have serious concerns about how we managed this project," BBC director general Tony Hall said."

"The Guardian" has their report here, linking to a "Daily Mail" report here.

"Broadcast Engineering" reports:-

"BBC Director General, Tony Hall, has scrapped the Digital Media Initiative (DMI) project saying it had "wasted a huge amount of license fee payers' money.” The write off equates to the annual receiver tax for around 670,000 homes."

"The UK’s National Audit Office (NAO), which scrutinizes public spending on behalf of the UK Parliament.  found that the BBC did not have an up-to-date assessment of its contractor’s (Siemens) capacity and capability to deliver the program."



Source:-
http://broadcastengineering.com/news/bbc-cans-tapeless-production-project-huge-c...

This is the text of an email from the DG:

From: "Tony Hall"
Date: 24 May 2013
Subject: Digital Media Initiative (DMI)

Dear All,

Following a review of the Digital Media Initiative (DMI), we have decided to stop the project in its current form. Since 2010, we will have spent £98.4m on DMI. Today’s decision means that we are writing-off all of the assets related to this project.  That’s a prudent thing to do.

We believe it is better to close it now rather than waste more money trying to develop it further.

DMI was an ambitious project when we launched it in 2008. The intention was to build new digital production tools to allow teams to develop, create, share and manage content digitally from their desktop as well as retrieve archive footage direct from the BBC’s vast archive at Perivale.

After we brought the project back in-house from Siemens, we relaunched it in 2010 and rolled out the first parts across the BBC in 2012, including the Fabric Archive Database. But DMI has continued to face challenges. It’s struggled to keep pace with new developments and requirements both within the BBC and the wider broadcasting industry. There are now standard off-the-shelf products that provide the kind of digital production tools that simply didn’t exist five years ago.

The need to produce content digitally hasn’t gone away. We will continue to work on ways to move, store, find and retrieve media from a central, digital archive at the BBC. The existing Fabric Archive database will also continue to be used across the BBC. However, we will stop developing our own in-house production tools, and instead use the industry-standard production systems that are now available.

As the Olympics, W1 and North migrations showed, the BBC can deliver major technology projects superbly. But sometimes it’s important to call time on a project if it’s proving too challenging and, more importantly, too costly to get it right.

Projects of this scale are not without risk and we are not alone in suffering from problems delivering them. But we have a responsibility to spend licence fee payers money as if it was our own and I’m sorry to say we did not do that here. We will now work with the Trust on a full review of what went wrong.

We will be looking into what has happened and will take appropriate action, disciplinary or otherwise.  The immediate situation has been brought under control and we have put appropriate safeguards in place around major projects so that this can never happen again. Our intention is to draw a line under DMI, make sure we learn from it, and ensure BBC Technology, Distribution and Archive is explicitly focussed on providing you with the best systems and products available to help you make programmes.

Best wishes,

Tony
Tony Hall
Director-General    

When accountants get put in charge of engineering, they will be dazzled by the potential cost savings and "streamlined workflow" that projects such as these will bring about. It is very clear that poor judgement has been an element in this and I would not be at all surprised if it has been somebody high up's pet project. It is clearly a management failure of the highest magnitude and the suspension of the BBC's CTO is a tacit admission of this fact.

Over recent years, the BBC has paid the vast majority of its engineers to leave and find a better life, myself included. Others have been outsourced and so will probably show the BBC the same degree of loyalty as the BBC has shown to the outsourced staff themselves. I daresay that had there been some engineering nous applied to this project, some realism might have emerged at an earlier stage.

There are "off the peg" systems in existence that will provide what DMI promised, plus a whole lot more! Avid is but one of the companies who specialise in this sort of thing.

DMI in itself is probably the right way to move the BBC's technology base forward but the way in which it has been implemented, or not is woeful. The BBC appears to have attempted to re-invent the wheel when there are several suitable wheels in the broadcasting world.

Looking back over the years, the BBC has been a wonderfully innovative organisation. It is the role of senior managers to regulate, moderate and promote such innovation.

I just hope that the BBC will learn from the DMI fisaco and show better judgement and more insight where they expend venture capital. Maybe they should recruit some more engineers to help with this judgement.

Fully agreed. Engineering is a core skill and discipline in making and broadcasting TV and radio programmes. It is indeed strange how the BBC has treated engineers as having scant value yet allowed accountants, who have little or no creative input to overrule just about every area of the BBC.

If you likened the BBC to a person, it would be clear that the BBC has a severe mental illness.One that has been brought about by accountancy strangulation.

The BBC needs to get back to directly employing those people that it needs to provide its output. this includes creatives, cameraman, riggers, sound people and of course engineers.

If it casts its fate the external market it condemns itself to the same mediocrity as the plethora of competing channels.

According to the BBC News Web-site, here:-



"A failed BBC IT project that was scrapped at a cost of £100m was a "complete catastrophe", a member of the BBC Trust has admitted.


Committee member Ian Swales MP suggested that the BBC management had been negligent or been lied to about the progress by others in the corporation."

The PAC committee meeting(minutes) is available as a downloadable file on the Parliament website(BBC). Most interesting reading and some seriously difficult questions raised.