Ex-BBC CTO To Sue Over Digital Media Initiative Sacking

Former BBC chief technology officer John Linwood (pictured) is to take legal action against the corporation over his sacking, Linwood revealed in written evidence given to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) ahead of hearings on Monday.

“I have issued legal proceedings against the BBC and intimated contractual claims, and am still involved in an internal process with the BBC,” Linwood stated in the evidence.

No technology failure

Linwood contested the BBC’s claims that the Digital Media Initiative (DMI), over which he was suspended and ultimately sacked without a payoff, was a complete failure.

Some elements of the project, such as the Metadata Archive, were still in use, while others, such as its production tools, were usable, but had been sidelined for business reasons, he said, arguing that the BBC was wrong when it claimed to the PAC that the project had created technology which did not work and was “worth nothing”.

He noted that Accenture had not reached any finding of technology failure in its report on the project.

“To the best of my knowledge and belief, and based on the reporting to me by the project team throughout the project, the DMI technology which we built works,” Linwood wrote. “In light of what had been delivered, the technology which was in use and ready to be used, my view was and remains that the scale of the write-down was unjustified.”

DMI, which was intended to create a centralised digital production process linking a digital archive with specialised production tools, was shut down in May 2013 after seven years in development. Linwood was suspended in May and sacked in July 2013, although the news of his sacking could not be revealed until January 2014 for unspecified legal reasons, according to the BBC. At the time of the project’s cancellation BBC chief executive Tony Hall stated that DMI had “wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money”.

Write-down ‘maximised’

Linwood claimed that the figure of nearly £98m written off by the BBC over the project was too high, alleging that at an April 2013 finance committee meeting the BBC’s director general said he wanted to “maximise the write-down”. Linwood claimed the true value of the write-down should have been less than £40m.

The PAC reported that the total costs of the project included £46.7m for contractors, £37.2m for IT, £24.9m paid to partners Siemens/Atos, £8.4m for consultants, £6.4m for BBC staff, and £2.3m in other costs.

Linwood said the BBC’s changes of business direction accounted for the project’s failure. The BBC told the executive board in May 2013 that due to a change in business direction the production tools developed under DMI would no longer be needed, he said.

Linwood claimed that this decision led to the ultimate failure of the project.

“By way of analogy, this change was equivalent to removing the first half of a production line in a factory and still expecting the factory to deliver the original products,” he wrote. “I believe that the DMI project would have been delivered and the benefits realised by now if the business had wanted to take Production Tools live.”

The first phase of the project, the Metadata Archive, was delayed by six months and went live in June 2012, a delay caused by the “significantly large number of changes requested by the business to the requirements which had been previously specified by them” according to Linwood.

Lack of coherence

He said that the business side “was not speaking with one voice” with relation to its requirements for the production tools and that there was “no senior owner on the business side who would take responsibility for implementation of the technology”.

PAC chair Margaret Hodge stated: “The BBC needs to learn from the mistakes it made and ensure that it never again spends such a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money with almost nothing to show for it.”

Following a National Accounting Office (NAO) report on DMI last week, BBC director of operations Dominic Coles said in a statement: “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.”

Senior BBC figures including former director general Mark Thompson are to give evidence to the PAC on Monday.

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