The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It • Hacker News Board

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#71

Post by DamnYuppie » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 4:54 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #14

JamisonM wrote: post #4

Real headline: Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. It seems to me that months or years of auditing and hearings and cries for heads to roll are probably wasted. Just like a private company a few mangers should probably get tossed or reassigned and the second version of the same project should get started to address the businesses needs the f…

>Publicly funded broadcaster makes same mistake most large private enterprises make in more or less the same way. Actually large private enterprises don't usually make this kind of mistake. This is a typical big government project. Software development is hard. Building large, complex, poorly defined software systems is hard. //EDIT I should clarify that. I don't think a private enterprise would engage in a project t…

Like many of the comments below I don't agree with this statement.

I have been at several mid to large sized private companies and have watched at least 4 $30mm+ projects go up in smoke over the years. Fortunately I have not been involved in any of them directly but I got a front row seat. Surprisingly more then half didn't result in extensive turnover of the key parties involved.

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#72

Post by sopooneo » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:00 PM UTC

dopamean wrote: post #11

amalag wrote: post #7

In the US I think noone even blinks an eye at $150 million anymore

It's funny you mention that. My first thought was, "wow, that's a lot of money." But then I thought, "but how much is it really?" I actually have no idea how much it should cost for them to do what they were trying to do though I suspect it is probably a fraction of that $150MM.

I expect that the lack of a clearly defined "what they were trying to do" was a large part of the problem.

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#73

Post by KaiserPro » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:00 PM UTC

MrDOS wrote: post #51

astrodust wrote: post #17

The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...

It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes ).

In the name of saving cost.

Tapes were (and still are) really expensive. at the time the BBC were really strapped for cash (as ITV were not long after.)

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#74

Post by gruseom » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:01 PM UTC

_yosefk wrote: post #43

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money". For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost…

There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out. As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long a…

This is untrue of large private enterprises, which are quite capable of throwing good money after bad, engaging in wishful thinking, and all the rest of it. As another commenter pointed out, the difference with the public sector may rather be that private failures can be more easily hidden.

I did one stint at a BigCo, during which they blew over $100M on a "platform of the future" project on which all their disparate software products were going to be developed going forward. It was obviously never going to work, yet they kept funding it and kept pushing it on all their software teams. Even though this was a massive failure, it was never announced as such or even explicitly canceled. It just crawled off to die alone somewhere. Official rhetoric was that the project had succeeded, and the executive who had championed it was promoted to run the entire software division of the company.

Edit: so I think the salient difference here is not private vs. public, but large vs. small.

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#75

Post by Suitov » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:05 PM UTC

rurounijones wrote: post #59

JonnieCache wrote: post #6

Note that the content in this CMS is hours and hours of raw video footage rather than the usual snippets of text.

hours? This is the BBC. It is probably months, possibly years worth of material.

Very definitely years. It wasn't just for finished programmes (i.e. ~ number-of-channels*24 hours of footage/day): it was for all rushes. All the footage that was filmed in the course of making the final programme.

We're talking stupid quantities of data here and I've never seen a detailed answer to how it was all supposed to be stored.

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#76

Post by superuser2 » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:07 PM UTC

_yosefk wrote: post #43

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money". For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost…

There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out. As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long a…

In what sense is it "their own money"? The programmers at a private enterprise are not doing anything with "their own money" besides collecting a salary. The same detachment from the outcome that happens in government work can happen in businesses, and it does all the time.

The people at the top of a business software product might be stockholders, so they could have some risk. The people at the top of a government project also understand that it will be their photo in the media along with the public outrage. And both understand that the consequences - whether public anger or a dip in the stock price - are temporary and will go away in a few weeks.

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#77

Post by leejoramo » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:11 PM UTC

_yosefk wrote: post #43

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing special about private enterprises that makes them immune to risk. As others have said, many IT projects fail [1]. In the private sector this is just seen as a business risk, but when a public sector project fails then its "wasting taxpayers money". For some reason the Economist article doesn't mention that the project was originally awarded to Siemens and Deloitte [2], but technical failures and cost…

There's something special about private enterprises making them reconsider their approaches, though - the fact that they lose their own money (which is often combined with having a smaller pool of money to begin with). Few enterprises can spend $150M and fewer will keep spending upon signs of things not working out. As to private contractors doing a poor job when paid with taxpayer money - makes some sense, as long a…

I know of a private newspaper with a circulation of around 30,000 that spent $3M on a failed Print software system.

How does that compare to the BBC's viewer & listenership numbers for $150M for a Audio/Video production system?

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#78

Post by jcromartie » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:24 PM UTC

dmragone wrote: post #23

I'm surprised more public projects don't run as bounty-style "build x and get $1 million" type systems. Rather than picking who's going to do what (or worse, building all in-house), having many different small times competing for one pot seems like it might be a better way to get a good starting foundation. Or perhaps that's a crazy idea for something as big as this.

Who has time to build a $1M system and only potentially get paid for it? I know the basement Lisp hacker[1] probably thinks he could cobble it together in a weekend, but the reality is that these are huge systems. How could you get a team of people to build a system with a $1M budget without knowing if they'd ever get paid? How would the bounty be awarded? How would they know the winner produced software that is up to snuff? Would there be multiple parallel betas? Would this system encourage people to cut corners? Would the person choosing the winner be able to just give their buddy the prize and turn down everybody else?

[1] at this very moment I'm in my basement, hacking on some Lisp

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#79

Post by leejoramo » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:36 PM UTC

MrDOS wrote: post #51

astrodust wrote: post #17

The same organization that couldn't be arsed to host some of their historical web properties due to "high costs": http://853blog.com/2011/01/25/pulling-the-plug-on-the-bbcs-i...

It strikes me that the BBC is hilariously bad at archival. They scrapped dozens of Doctor Who episodes in the name of saving space ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes ).

Not just the BBC. Everyone did that.

Read about how Groucho Marx's grandson saved "You Bet Your Life" from NBC's trashing.

Even into the 1980's Ted Turner made a large part of his fortune by buying the back catalog of movie studios who saw almost no value in their archives. Turner saw the value of playing these old films on cable and video tape sales.

EDIT: forgot this link

http://boingboing.net/2013/03/12/the-day-my-grandfather-grou...

Re: The BBC's hi-tech failure: Don't Mention It

#80

Post by CraigRood » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 5:50 PM UTC

Suitov wrote: post #75

rurounijones wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hours? This is the BBC. It is probably months, possibly years worth of material.

Very definitely years. It wasn't just for finished programmes (i.e. ~ number-of-channels*24 hours of footage/day): it was for all rushes. All the footage that was filmed in the course of making the final programme. We're talking stupid quantities of data here and I've never seen a detailed answer to how it was all supposed to be stored.

I'm not going to pretend I know what I'm talking about because this project was VAST - but would't a mkv type solution over P2P (BitTorrent more specifically) been more practical? I can't help but think they tried to make it too complicated and it just collapsed, not much different than your typical startup.