Live3 Feb 2014:
Full coverage as the former director general is grilled by a
Commons committee over the failed Digital Media Initiative. By Jason Deans and John Plunkett
LiveFull coverage as the former director general is grilled by a Commons committee over the failed Digital Media Initiative
Former BBC director general Mark Thompson is
to face MPs on the public accounts committe over the £100m Digital
Media Initiative IT fiasco. Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters
'Chunking it up'
Coles says that following the DMI debacle, the BBC is pursuing a
very different strategy for digital video archiving and editing,
allowing different departments to have their own systems from outside
suppliers.
"We're chunking it up into deliverable projects. We're
going to market ... delivering by getting the right thing for the BBC.
We're going to deliver to our production areas tools they need now," he
tells MPs. "We are no longer going to be [delivering] one integrated 'it
all works or nothing works' [system]."
BBC still paying £3m a year to IBM for DMI database
Dominic Coles, the only witness still working for the BBC, is
quizzed about what can be salvaged from the wreckage of DMI – the answer
appears to be not much.
Coles is asked by Lib Dem MP Ian Swales why the value of DMI has been written down to nothing.
He
says the only element of DMI that is operational, the metadata archive
(also referred to as the archive database) may have 3,000 users, but
only 163 staff are using it regularly. "It is incredibly clunky. It was
designed for something far bigger and more ambitious."
He adds
that the value of DMI has been written down to zero as further
investment is going to be necessary to replace this database, which
takes "up to 10 times longer to use" than the system it replaced.
Swales
says the running cost of the archive database is £5m a year, replacing a
system that cost far less, Infax, which is 40 years old. Coles responds
that the BBC has negotiated down what it pays IBM from £5m to £3m for
the archive database contract. "It's appalling value for money," he
adds.
Updated
'We were all in the dark'
Fry is pressed again about the BBC Trust's role. "As chair of the
[BBC Trust] finance committee, this end result is hugely embarrassing.
The total project, right the way through the BBC, was an embarrassment,"
he responds.
However, he repeats his view that the trust could
not have done anything more about the failure of DMI, given the lack of
information they were given about the true state of the project – and
neither could the BBC executive board, headed by Thompson. "We were all
in the dark," Fry says.
Updated
Thompson accused of never writing anything down
Tory MP Stewart Jackson puts it to Thompson that there is a "golden
thread running through your time at the BBC – you never wrote anything
down". He cites severance payments and DMI. "What did you ever write
down?" Jackson adds. "The ambience around your regime is not healthy."
Thompson
comes back strongly on this point: "Please don't characterise [my time
as director general] as a period where every project went badly." He
cites the iPlayer and the 2012 London Olympics as major projects
delivered successfully during his tenure.
Updated
BBC Trust: 'We clearly didn't do enough'
Anthony Fry offers a mea culpa on behalf of the BBC Trust. The
former trustee says "with the benefit of hindsight" there is "no
question mistakes were made by the trust". These were:
1.
Following the February 2011 PAC hearing, there were plans for an
internal audit of the DMI project. This never happened as the managers
responsible for DMI had just "had the NAO all over them" and just wanted
to "get on with it" and get things back on track.
2. The BBC
Trust lacked the specialist technical expertise "to ask proper
questions" about DMI. "I wish, I sincerely wish, we had appointed
outside consultants."
3. The trust gave BBC management "too much
leeway" after an "amber red" warning about problems with DMI was flagged
in late 2011.
However, Fry adds that he does not believe the DMI
fiasco is an example of a failure of governance by the BBC Trust, as it
could only act on the information it was given. As a result, they could
have spent 365 days a year on DMI, but he is not sure the outcome would
have been different.
Updated
Hodge: so were you misled?
Hodge asks Thompson repeatedly whether, if he did not mislead the
PAC in February 2011, was he misled about how DMI was proceeding?
Thompson
repeatedly declines to be drawn into such a bald statement. He says
what is now clear is that there was a difference of opinion between the
BBC's technology department and other departments about DMI.
However,
he will not go as far as blaming other departments for DMI's failure,
as Linwood appeared to do in his earlier evidence. Thompson says "senior
people" in BBC Vision and BBC North made efforts to ensure DMI worked.
"Overall this was a project where a lot of effort went in on the
programming side to get it to work."
Hodge has one final go, asking Thompson, given the evidence he gave to the PAC in February 2011, "were you misled?"
"I believed it," he replies, referring to what he was being told by colleagues at the time about DMI.
He
goes as far as to blame the "language" used in a DMI briefing note he
based his February 2011 answers on, along with a list of shows,
including The One Show, which were apparently using the system at the
time.
Updated
Mark Thompson: I'm sorry but I haven't misled you
Hodge asks Mark Thompson whether he misled the PAC in February 2011
when he told them "DMI is out in the business", being used by "many
programmes" and on track to be delivered to BBC North in Salford that
year. He also said the feedback was positive and the BBC was planning a
wider roll out than originally planned.
"That appears to have
misled us again," she concludes, referring to previous disagreements
with the committee over executive payoffs.
Thompson replies: "I
don't believe I have knowingly misled you on other matters and I don't
believe I have misled you on this one."
"Everything I have seen
seems to suggest DMI was not a success … It failed in a way that meant
the loss of a lot of public money.
"I want to say sorry, I want to apologise for the failure of this project."
Updated
Caroline Thomson asked: are you going to pay back payoff?
Former BBC director general Mark Thompson and chief operating officer Caroline Thomson are up now.
Margaret
Hodge, committee chair, springs a redundancy payoffs question on
Thomson – is she going to return the £680,000 she received?
"No I'm not," she replies.
Updated
DMI: a troubled history
Former BBC chief technology officer John Linwood is up first. He
says when he joined the BBC, the DMI project "was already 18 months to
two years behind track". He adds that code supplied by Siemens, the
original outside contractor on the project before BBC took it in-house,
wasn't good enough to use.
In September 2010, we published a new schedule saying DMI would be delivered at the end of 2011 or early 2012, Linwood says.
There
were teething problems – Linwood says he went to one of his line
managers, ex BBC chief operating officer Caroline Thomson, to get her to
speak to George Entwistle, then director of BBC Vision, to get his
broadcasting and production division to "engage" with DMI.
BBC
North, based in the BBC's new centre in Salford, was also piloting DMI
and talking about buying an interim solution. Linwood says he also spoke
to Thomson about this as he was worried BBC North might take longer to
adopt DMI when it was eventually ready for use if it had brought in
another system in the interim.
Updated
BBC: we got DMI wrong, we're learning the lessons
Dominic Coles, the BBC director of operations, said last week: "As
we have previously acknowledged, the BBC got this one wrong. We took
swift action to overhaul how major projects are managed after we closed
DMI last year.
"DMI aside, we have a strong track record of
successfully delivering major projects such as the BBC iPlayer and the
digital Olympics and we will continue to innovate to deliver new
technology to the public."
Diane Coyle, the BBC Trust vice-chair,
said: "It is essential that the BBC learns from the losses incurred in
the DMI project and applies the lessons to running technology projects
in future.
"As we announced last December, we are working with the
executive to strengthen project management and reporting arrangements
within a clearer governance system. This will ensure that serious
problems can be spotted and addressed at an earlier stage."
Updated
Tough questions over written evidence to PAC
The PAC published 90 pages of written evidence last week, including a submission by Linwood,
who was dismissed last year after DMI was scrapped and is taking legal
action against the BBC. In his evidence he defends his role in the DMI
project, saying it delivered "a substantial amount of technology".
Linwood
blames a "changed vision" of how DMI was supposed to work for its
difficulties and closure and accuses the BBC of allowing "inaccurate
statements to be made to the PAC to the effect that the 'kit doesn't
work' and is 'worth nothing'". The evidence also includes a submission from Bill Garrett,
the former head of technology for BBC Vision Productions, who warned
that DMI was doomed in 2012. Garrett said he believed that four years
ago "a number of staff knowingly falsified estimates of financial
benefits" in order to secure further funding for the project.
He
also called on the BBC to investigate further his belief that "certain
individuals acted wilfully to subvert governance processes and falsify
value propositions so as to deceive the various governance panels".
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