A couple of days ago I wrote an opin­ion piece on why I feel that being forced to duplic­ate exist­ing soft­ware pro­jects due to an anti­quated and lim­ited infra­struc­ture is a large part of the reason the BBC is fall­ing far behind the rest of the industry in its inter­net offerings.

To put this in con­text, until two days ago this site has had about 100 vis­it­ors total, so I was a little sur­prised to find that within hours the art­icle was mak­ing its way onto the front page of Reddit, and being cir­cu­lated amongst tech­no­logy blog­gers. In most cir­cum­stances it was accom­pan­ied by under-informed and wildly inac­cur­ate com­ments and extra­pol­a­tions about the BBC from people who have either never worked there, or not worked there in the bet­ter part of a dec­ade. (I’ve also spent far too much time over the past couple of days delet­ing com­ments along the lines of “this is why we should abol­ish the licence fee”, strangely most of these com­ments com­ing from Americans.)

A lot of people missed the point of what I was writ­ing about, which I’ll attrib­ute to me not mak­ing myself suf­fi­ciently clear. I was not talk­ing about the BBC’s web sites, about the qual­ity of the corporation’s cre­at­ive out­put, nor about what the situ­ation was prior to the sell-off of BBC Technology sev­eral years ago. What I was talk­ing about are the reas­ons that today, in 2007, the BBC is stuck with an archaic tech­no­lo­gical infra­struc­ture, and how that ulti­mately hurts the BBC’s long-term strategy to be “part of the web” and not just a set of web pages.

You see, des­pite the crit­ical han­di­cap of its infra­struc­ture, the BBC does amaz­ing things with its con­tent. It takes a little longer than the rest of the industry to get those things out there, but con­sid­er­ing the size of the cor­por­a­tion, the all-encompassing nature of its audi­ence, and its risk-averse lead­er­ship, that’s not surprising.

It’s also true that the BBC suf­fers from mul­tiple per­son­al­ity dis­order, and that within the cor­por­a­tion not all things are equal. As was poin­ted out in the com­ments on my art­icle, BBC Journalism (what used to be BBC News) has its own infra­struc­ture that lies more within the con­trol of the BBC. The dif­fer­ence is clear — BBC News has to be able to respond in the most flex­ible and reli­able man­ner ima­gin­able as the chan­ging pres­sures of world events and audi­ences demand more of their infra­struc­ture than almost any other in the world. Waiting months for bug-fixes and code reviews to make minor changes would be the kiss of death for the BBC’s News offerings.

That’s really the crux of the mat­ter. The BBC cer­tainly can be slow to react to change, but over the past couple of years there has been enorm­ous pres­sure from within the cor­por­a­tion to move for­wards with this whole “inter­net” thing. It’s safe to say that the vast major­ity of the people work­ing in on-line con­tent at the BBC do actu­ally “get it”, and even the tra­di­tional lin­ear media people are catch­ing on. There are some truly excep­tional pro­jects com­ing out of the BBC in the near future (espe­cially on the CBBC and CBeebies side of things), and it’s not fair to tar every­one with the same brush.

A bril­liant example of what the BBC does right is described in Curtis Poe’s response to my art­icle. He says:

[T]oday when I got into work, I found a scath­ing email from one of the higher ups. He read the “BBC Fails at the Internet” post and rather than blow a gas­ket that internal details had been made pub­lic, he for­war­ded it to the respons­ible parties, said he agreed, and made it very clear that the prob­lem will be fixed immediately…

Now, wouldn’t that be a fine thing?