BBC DMI Project Info for Backstage (Part 1)

Digital Media Initiative (DMI)

DMI Project Info - Backstage 1 08/08/07

Digital Media Initiative

Project Summary Document

Version 1.0

Issued to the backstage.bbc.co.uk community under a Creative Commons License



1 Introduction

It is generally recognised that the media industry is undergoing a fundamental shift towards an environment characterised by audiences consuming digital content delivered on demand through platforms of their choice. As outlined through the Creative Future strategy, the BBC’s ambition is to be at the vanguard of global media organisations operating in this exciting, but challenging new world and to continue to be able to serve the ever changing needs of audiences in the UK and abroad.

Fulfilling this ambition requires considerable change across the BBC. The Digital Media Initiative (DMI) is at the heart of this transformation providing the BBC with a flexible, multiplatform enabled, digital production capability with the associated technology infrastructure.

This document presents the Target Operating Model (TOM) for the DMI programme and describes how the organisation will change across its people, process and technology aspects as a result of implementation of DMI. The DMI solution will deliver the BBC the following capabilities:

• Collaborative multiplatform production capability: DMI will allow multiplatform programme making teams to work together throughout the production lifecycle and provide individuals access to the work-in-progress content from the point of its inception regardless of the platform.

• Streamlined and agile production process: The move from tape to file-based digital production workflow will reduce the time consuming activities relating to the handling of tapes and allow more time to be spent on creative, editorial tasks.

• High quality information about assets: DMI will drive a step change in behaviour towards an asset management culture where information about the content is captured at the point of knowledge and gradually enhanced to facilitate effective exploitation of content throughout the asset’s life.

• Flexible infrastructure capable of supporting future services: DMI provides a solid, reusable foundation for cost effective delivery of new and emerging audience facing services.

2 Scope of DMI

This section outlines the scope of the DMI programme. The section is structured as follows:

• Key Drivers for DMI: Contains an outline of the underlying business drivers and rationale for the DMI programme.

• Key Programme Principles: Defines a set of principles that have been developed with the business areas and that have been used to guide and direct the design and implementation of the DMI programme.



• Introduction to Enablers and their Impact: Introduces the concept of an Enabler, defines the Enablers that DMI will deliver and describes how their implementation will address the identified key challenges BBC are facing.

• Enabler Definition: Describes the key functionality available from each of the Enablers.

• Outline of Process Scope: Defines the scope of DMI in terms of the types of processes the programme impacts across the BBC.

2.1 Key Drivers for DMI

The underlying business drivers and rationale for DMI encompass both internal capability development and market and external pressures.

2.1.1 Internal Capability Development

• Delivery of the process and technology change required to support a true multiplatform and on-demand BBC. The strategy to deliver multiplatform commissions cannot be achieved effectively without investment in DMI and thus the objectives that form part of the Creative Future will not be achievable.

• Addressing the operational metadata issues within the BBC in a way that supports our audience facing services and enables cross platform exploitation of our assets.

• Improve our ability to find content to facilitate the re-use and exploitation of our assets. At present, our audiences can access our content faster than we can.

• Allowing content that is ‘born’ digital to ‘stay’ digital, which in turn increases our ability to exploit that content for both public service and commercial use.

• The provision of a more agile infrastructure that is more responsive to changing audience needs and less dependent on manual and costly ‘back office’ processes.

2.1.2 Market & External Pressure

• The technology contained is fast becoming the de-facto way of doing things and providing we work with the right suppliers the risk is manageable and the technology will be far from heroic.

• The metadata issue requires immediate internal attention if we are to be in a strong position in 4-5 years time. There is no quick fix to this area but a number of early wins can be achieved through some basic investment from next year.

• Irrespective of the Open Archive service strategy, there is no doubt that in 5 years time, the archive will need to be a core part of our portfolio in order to achieve our objectives, and to enable this, the work needs to begin now.

2.2 Key Programme Principles

The following programme principles have been defined to guide the design of the DMI TOM and to provide direction for further phases of the programme. These have been grouped into Business and Technology Programme principles.



2.2.1 Business Programme Principles

• Focused on the productions that are critical to enabling production areas to deliver their Creative Future and have the characteristics to transition effectively and will demonstrate real and visible change to the business.

• Focus on and enable creativity.

• Foster cross business area activity and new types of output.

• Exploit cross business area synergies.

• Be a pan-BBC Solution which delivers pan-BBC benefits.

• Have agreed, common and consistent policies and guidelines.

• Deliver role based and team based training.

• Deliver business area specific support which is designed alongside systems and processes and not at the end.

• Make things simpler, easier and better.

• Be bottom up and business led.

• Enable a new integrated I&A business which puts metadata at the heart of the production.

2.2.2 Technology Programme Principles

• Be flexible to support new types of platforms.

• Follow the write once, read many principle (WORM).

• Be Digital Fabric based (e.g. a single interface between multiple systems).

• Have an appropriate scale of resilience against architecture.

• Support Open Standards.

• Support commodity items.

• Avoid duplication and conform to the overall BBC architecture principles.

Please refer to Appendix A for the complete list of principles relating to the DMI programme.

2.3 Introduction to Enablers and their Impact

The various elements that the DMI programme delivers to the BBC are described through a set of enablers. An enabler can be understood as a set of capabilities that the business will have following the implementation of a joined up people, process and technology solution.

DMI programme consists of six enablers defined as follows:



• Enabler 1 – Work in Progress: Enables smarter decisions early in the production process, multiple users accessing content and added agility in the multiplatform production process.

• Enabler 2 – Archive: Allows content that is ‘born digital’ to ‘stay’ digital, richly tagged to enable the content to be exploited for both audiences and commercial use.

• Enabler 3 – Bundle and Package: Provides the ability to seamlessly convert content from finished form for various platforms.

• Enabler 4 – Shoot: Allows tape to be removed from the shooting process, reduces time spent ingesting footage and provides the opportunity to record metadata during the shooting process.

• Enabler 5 – Craft: Enables complex editing to be completed on lower cost desktop based packages.

• Enabler 6 – Share: Facilitates multiple users including 3rd parties to access content adding increased agility to the production process.

Through their involvement in the programme the production areas have highlighted the current production challenges and issues that they consider the DMI enablers will help resolve. These encompass current challenges across the production process, with the way that the BBC manages assets, with rights management and with generating content for multiplatforms. They include:

• More time will be spent focused on creative tasks and producing the end-user experience – rather than searching, chasing and retrieving assets and archive tapes.

• Production and multiplatform teams will be able to work together collaboratively, reviewing and sharing captured material within their teams and between other teams.

• There will be connectivity (and communication) between different production teams at different sites.

• Assets will only be logged once, by one area, reducing multiple logging and the time required to search and retrieve tape material by improved and accurate metadata capture.

• It will be easier to store and retrieve digital assets as search engine functionality will be brought to the desktop.

• The review process will become more efficient as staff will be able to review and edit material at the desktop and earlier in the production cycle.

• Content rights (and remaining rights) will be dynamically tracked to ensure rights information remains with the material.

• There will be a reduction in the current tape archive over time.

• File transfer will become more efficient between the BBC and Red Bee.

Please note that enablers were conceived to help to articulate what the DMI programme offers to the business and allow the different production areas to determine what elements of the DMI can best support their business.



In order to support the development of an achievable delivery approach and to link the solution to the business case impacts, each Enabler has been decomposed into a set of more detailed components that can be scheduled to a project plan to deliver a part of an enabler.

BBC DMI Project Info for Backstage (Part 1)

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