BBC faces damning criticism over £100m DMI fiasco in NAO report

• BBC admits it 'got this one wrong'• Executive board 'applied insufficient scrutiny'• 'Governance arrangements … were inadequate'Read the NAO report on the BBC's handling of the DMI projectThe BBC's handling of the £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco has come in for further criticism, with a catalogue of errors uncovered by a National Audit Office report which delivered a damning verdict on Mark Thompson and Lord Patten's handling of the IT project.The NAO report published on Tuesday said the BBC executive board, led by then director general Thompson, had paid insufficient scrutiny to the failing IT project over an 18-month period and the BBC Trust, chaired by Patten, had not done enough to challenge it.According to the NAO, the BBC was "too optimistic" about its ability to complete the project after it took it in-house from contractor Siemens in 2009, with reporting arrangements "not fit for purpose" and no single manager made responsible for the entire venture. DMI was eventually scrapped in May 2013, at a cost of £98.4m to licence fee payers.The executive at the centre of the DMI initiative, chief technology officer John Linwood, left the BBC in July last year when his contract was terminated without a payoff, the corporation confirmed last week.The project – which was supposed to do away with the need for videotapes across the BBC and use digital technology to call up archive footage - was scrapped just a month into director general Tony Hall's tenure in 2013, with... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2014-01-28 00:00:00 UTC ]
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