BBC spends £98.4 million on failed DMI project

The BBC has today announced that the corporation’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) is to be closed before the project has completed after failing to deliver on expectations.

In a letter to public accounts committee chair Margaret Hodge, BBC Trustee Anthony Fry writes that completing the project, which has cost the BBC almost £100 million up to this point, would be the “equivalent of throwing good money after bad”.

“It is of utmost concern to us that the project which has already failed to deliver value for money in its early stages has now spent so much more of licence fee payers’ money,” said Fry.

The DMI was originally approved in 2008 and set out to move the BBC’s production and archive operations to a fully integrated digital way of working.

The project was expected to help production teams find content from the BBC’s vast archive, and to ensure that future content and data could be captured, edited and made available at each step of the production process.

However, in his letter, Fry admits that the project has generated little or no assets.

“The Trust is extremely concerned by the way the project has been managed and reported to us and we intend to act quickly to ensure that that there can be no repeat of a failure on this scale,” he said.

As a result of shortcomings, Director General Tony Hall has ceased the project entirely and will launch an inquiry to find out what went wrong.

“The DMI project has wasted a huge amount of licence fee payers’ money and I saw no reason to allow that to continue which is why I have closed it,” Hall said. “I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned.

“Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure, it does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here.”