Get a grip! BBC blasted over £100m IT disaster

THE BBC wasted almost £100 million on a failed IT project because senior executives ‘did not have sufficient grip’, an inquiry has found.

The Digital Media Initiative was riddled with confusion, delays and inadequate controls, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) said yesterday.

And even though the scheme was axed last year, parts are still operational and costing licence fee payers £3 million a year, the public spending watchdog revealed.

The findings are the latest blow to the BBC over DMI, which was launched in 2008 in order to digitise the Corporation’s archives so that staff could easily share and download material remotely.

But it quickly ran into delays, eventually costing the licence fee payer £98.4 million when it was scrapped last May. However, yesterday’s NAO report revealed that until last month DMI still cost £5.3 million a year to run because of costly software licences and maintenance contracts.

The BBC said it has now reduced the amount to £3 million, but admitted it has not yet switched off its old system, which costs an additional £780,000 a year to maintain.

Bosses were also criticised for failing to ensure ‘clear accountability’ for the project. Instead, responsibility was shared between finance head Zarin Patel, chief operating officer Caroline Thomson and technology boss John Linwood, who was sacked over the debacle last year.

The report said Miss Patel – who was paid £337,000 a year – did not even attend some meetings and sent a member of her team instead.

Next week, the trio will be grilled over their roles by MPs on the public accounts committee, alongside members of the BBC Trust and former director- general Mark Thompson. Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee, last night said she was shocked by the ‘astronomic losses’, adding: ‘This report reads like a catalogue of how not to run a major programme. These failures go right to the top.’

Yesterday’s report comes after accountant PriceWaterhouseCoopers last month found DMI was ‘not fit for purpose’. NAO chief Amyas Morse said: ‘The BBC executive did not have sufficient grip on its DMI programme. Nor did it commission a thorough independent assessment of the whole system to see whether it was technically sound.’

Dominic Coles, the BBC’s director of operations, said: ‘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.’

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