1 Margaret Hanley © BBC 06/03/2005 6 March 2004 Change, influence and IA at the BBC Margaret Hanley Executive Producer - Core Products Bbc.co.uk
Dec 05, 2014
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
2Margaret Hanley© BBC 06/03/2005
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)
3Margaret Hanley© BBC 06/03/2005
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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Systems, people and content
• 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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Systems, people and content
• 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
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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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6 March 2004
Thank you
Questions or comments?
Margaret Hanley