Change, Influence and IA at the BBC

1Margaret Hanley© BBC 06/03/2005

6 March 2004

Change, influence and IA at the BBC

Margaret Hanley

Executive Producer - Core Products

Bbc.co.uk


6 March 2004

Introduction

• Margaret Hanley• Executive Producer – Core Products BBC• Worked on three continents – Australia, USA

and UK• Been both a consultant and internal staff to

companies like Sensis (Yellow Pages in Australia), Argus Associates (US), Ingenta (UK and BBC (UK)


6 March 2004

Agenda

• BBC Background

• Influence and culture within the BBC

• What is PIPs?

• What was the IA challenge?

• Systems, people and content

• Lessons Learnt

• Questions


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BBC Background

• Divisions or “petals” with New Media groups

• Central New Media division that develops applications

• Programme information traditionally created with or after the programme finished – very incomplete information

• One credible/complete source based on TV/Radio listings


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Influence and culture at the BBC

• Emphasis is on established traditional media– TV; then Radio; then New Media

• Changing culture; new DG, change of audience consumption of media– Reduction in traditional media use for younger

audiences

• Networking is important


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PIPs

• Programme information pages – a page for every programme episode, broadcast on BBC

• Cross-divisional project– Radio and Music interactive and New Media

Central


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IA Challenge

• Use of content from one source – complete but very badly structured – unable to distinguish a brand title from an episode title in the free-text long description field

• In the short term, to make small editorial changes within the feed to allow that separation; in the long term, identify how to change the source to give us the content in the right format


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IA Challenge

• Content limited– Some programmes had lots of information;

some had very little– So hard to create a page layout that didn’t

look empty– No consistent metadata attached to a

programme information


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Systems, people and content

• Systems– Using industry and business standards – the BBC

does have a corporate data standard SMEF ™– that our product uses it; but very few other systems do

– Digital TV and Radio production at the BBC is just starting to happen

– So now there is leverage from the “business” to actually use it in upstream system like digital production or capture of information by Information and Archive


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• People/ Cultural change– Changing working practices so that content could be

re-used and highlighting that metadata about a programme can be as important as the programme itself

– See Radio 3 staff work better with the EPG Unit– Start creating content earlier in the process

• making use of broadcast assistants • I & A staff • working together rather than always doing it downstream

once the content has been created


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• Content– Quality of content becoming better once the content is

“seen in perpetuity”, rather than deleted after 7 days– More information collated together and built upon by

the people who know about it – the production staff and the users

– Moving from metadata standards that are used to find a tape again or create an Electronic Programme Guide to one with more granularity and depth


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Incremental change

• Change in systems in such a large organisation like the BBC takes time and is mostly bottom-up – it infiltrates the organisation; imposition in “the most creative organisation in the world” doesn’t work

• Radical and revolutionary change takes time and is top-down – both are happening at the BBC


6 March 2004

Influence

• Networking is a more powerful influencer than pure business value

• But…New Media people don’t consider themselves inferior or as “only support” to the main business as many in HR or Finance have; and this has been re-enforced in the org structure


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Influence

• New Media is using existing frameworks to help generate change; and it’s leading the BBC in this

• Using SMEF™ and then asking the upstream for the information to be provided in the same format


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Lessons learnt

• Once the product is released it is easier (and harder) to go forward– Easier with an application that you can

actually see– Harder everyone wants a piece and the ability

to interface with other– Gets pretty weird when the DG talks about

context and findability – the core of your work


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Thank you

Questions or comments?

Margaret Hanley

[email protected]

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Change, Influence and IA at the BBC