The £98.4m figure attributed to the failed Digital Media Initiative (DMI) may be a conservative estimate: the BBC Trust has commissioned an external technical inquiry into the fiasco, to discover how it happened and how much it really cost licence-fee payers. The trust has also axed the initiative.
The Beeb confirmed to The Register that CTO John Linwood, who was paid £287,800 last year, has been suspended on full wages. “Technology controller” Peter Coles will take over as acting chief technology officer and report to BBC operations director Dominic Coles.
BBC Director General Tony Hall said that DMI had "wasted a huge amount of Licence Fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue". Continuing DMI, wrote BBC Trustee Anthony Fryin a letter to Parliament's influential Public Accounts Committee, would be "throwing good money after bad".
"The industry has developed standardised off-the-shelf digital production tools that did not exist five years ago," explained Dominic Coles in a blog post. "The cost is so great because much of the software and hardware which has been developed would only have a value if the project was completed and we cannot continue to sanction any additional spending on this initiative."
In an internal email seen by The Register announcing the management change, Coles added:
"It’s important that we make sure that a project failure of this scale never happens again and I will continue to work with the [technology, delivery and archives] senior management group, together with and all our key stakeholders across the BBC through the Operations Board, to ensure that we have appropriate safeguards in place to avoid a similar situation in the future."
The BBC has an IT budget of £400m a year.
Source: The Register
