BBC to refresh ERP estate

Linwood explained that he is also looking at outcome-based contracts, so rather than demanding a certain technology or feature from a vendor, he simply describes what he wants employees to achieve.

"This removes vendor lock-in to a degree, so we can evolve the technology with a single vendor and still have a flexible outcome," said Linwood.

A further evolution at the BBC is that environments such as the ERP estate are now expected to be multi-source.

"The BBC has some very large single-vendor contracts, and now we're looking at where we can go with several best-of-breed suppliers," he said. "We signed a contract with Siemens eight years ago which is coming up for re-procurement in a couple of years, and it's now with [integrator] ATOS. We're looking to to go with three to five best-of-breed suppliers for different towers within that contract."

For Linwood, this is the next phase of outsourcing.

"The world has moved on from 'generation one' of outsourcing which was to find one person who could solve everything," he said. "We've all now learnt that that doesn't work as no one can be an expert at everything. You end up with five layers of sub-contractors and it becomes quite unwieldy.

"Where the world is now is a multi-source environment where you have a service integration layer with a number of towers beneath that with different suppliers. That's the direction we're going with procurements at the moment."