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 15,000 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 IT-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 asApple’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.
Another facet of the modern media organisation is the interdependency of its software systems. For example, scheduling, which originally stood on its own and is now managed using a single integrated commissioning and scheduling platform called Orion, directly affects resources and feeds into broadcast playout as well as finances, said Linwood. “One of our key milestones is to map these dependencies and understand how they all fit together,” he said.
There is also a third division overseen by Linwood that focuses more on the technology architecture of projects such as Media City in Salford and the West One Project at Broadcasting House.
New technologies
Being from a new media background means that Linwood is well versed in the benefits of cloud computing and virtualisation.
“We’re already fairly advanced in a number of research projects around the cloud and are looking to deploy them right across the Beeb – not just for our internal business systems but our external web on-demand systems too,” he said.
The cloud might be used to meet the call for on-demand coverage of the London 2012 Olympics. “As the UK broadcaster for the Games, we are anticipating probably the biggest demand in the history of computing for media consumption – it will be a huge spike. The cloud would help us to cope with that,” said Linwood.
In addition, the BBC has not been slow to use virtualisation in its business and deploys such tools in software testing. It is also looking to deploy virtualisation to run a number of business systems as well as web and on-demand services.
Linwood believes his work steering innovation at the BBC is only just starting: “Over the next three to five years, the nature of the BBC and media in general will change fundamentally and it will have technology at its core. My challenge is clear: it’s about steering the organisation through this change, and I can honestly say that I think it is the most exciting job in TV right now. ”
New CIO will focus on delivering new business solutions
John Linwood appointed new CIO Tiffany Hall last week, in a move that will see the delivery of the group’s internal business systems “beefed up”, according to Linwood. Hall will be responsible for 250 staff in IT delivery and policy, information security and internal businesses.
Although the BBC does not formally map its staff competencies, it does have a well-respected training academy, which has a technology division and trains software and hardware engineers – and they are given accreditation for different levels of training at different stages of their career.
Hall will benefit from leadership and strategy training from the management division of the academy. She has also been given a senior executive mentor, to “get ideas, a non-biased opinion and ask questions”, according to Linwood.
Source:http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2251655/leaders-call-shots-bbc-4864426
