IT leaders call the shots at the BBC

BBC technology has been re-organised

Being chief technology officer (CTO) at the BBC is a big job, but John Linwood is not daunted; he was used to high-profile work before his move to the organisation in April. He spent 10 years working for Microsoft, at various senior positions within MSN, before moving to Yahoo for a five-year stint as senior vice president of international engineering in charge of 1,600 staff at 22 locations.

Linwood has spent his first six months in the job focused on a company-wide restructure of all the BBC’s broadcast and enterprise technology assets. Last week as part of the restructure he appointed Tiffany Hall (see below) to the role of chief information officer (CIO).

When he talks about his reasons for moving to the BBC, he cites his software engineering experience.

“I was approached because of my understanding that media is now run on software and will be increasingly managed by the IT industry. I gained this understanding with Microsoft and latterly with Yahoo,” he said.

As CTO, Linwood oversees 1,100 staff across the organisation, including workers in news, BBC World Service, technical operations and the future media and technology division.

Output provisioning
He has created three main groups as part of the restructure: the first is focused on output provisioning and is governed by a small team of technology controllers. The controllers must understand what output is required to help staff in media delivery to understand how technology makes it possible.

Staff need to be aware of what is required to output HD broadcast, and more recently 3D, and there has also been a big move to digital production as well as multi-platform content. Linwood said understanding the technology behind these services is essential.

“It is no longer possible to create media in absence of knowledge of technology. Staff looking after the content must understand what can be done with technology and the impact technology can have on audiences,” he said.

Underlying this, at the infrastructure level, is a huge growth in IP-based transport of broadcast output. This changes the way media is moved and managed and has major ramifications for the organisation.

The BBC was able to reduce its management overheads earlier this year by bringing together several teams that had originally worked independently of each other. These included the technology teams supporting BBC World Service and that of audio and music. There were also similar cuts made to the engineering headcount.

Linwood said an additional benefit to bringing together a number of teams was that broadcast engineers who had previously been confined to their respective departments were now being trained to use multiple platforms.

The CIO’s new remit
One large part of the organisation’s restructure is the creation of the CIO’s division. This unit is responsible for the management of data related to the transmission and output of broadcast services, as well as IT delivery and policy, information security and internal businesses, and oversees software procurement.

The team looking after software contracts is charged with scheduling resources and ensuring the requisite expertise around the software. They must also be experts in change management.

Linwood said change is something everyone in technology must be trained to cope with, and that this is particularly true in the area of outsourcing contracts.

Traditionally, projects would be outsourced on a two-year fixed basis, but as Linwood said: “The technology market, competition and requirements of the audience are changing more quickly than they have in the past ­ – the fixed-term contracts no longer work.”

Consequently, the organisation is looking to reduce the time frame of the co ntracts, as well as the size of the deliverables. “The changing nature of the business can be reported back to the software developers or procurers, which me ans they can adapt and change direction,” he said.

A practical example of this was the change the BBC saw as a result of moving to tapeless production. With everything digitised, the corporation saw a huge reduction in the need for craft editors and the software they use, because ordinary journalists were able to do a great deal of editing from their desktops using systems such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro or Avid Xpress Pro. This was a result no one had foreseen and one that meant the BBC had to reorganise the business.