The BBC has closed its multimillion pound Digital Media Initiative (DMI) that was meant to create new digital production tools and link them with a central, digital archive that would allow BBC staff to access a seamless digital chain throughout the production process.
Initialised in 2008, the DMI aimed to bring those processes together so that everything could be accessed from the same system and stored on a computer.
The decision to abandon it follows an operational review of the project that was launched in October 2012. The report found that DMI was not going to deliver on its stated objectives and, as a result, BBC director-general Tony Hall took the decision to close it with the agreement of the BBC Trust. The total cost of DMI to the BBC will be £98.4m.
Following the decision to close the project, the BBC Trust has launched an independent review to establish what went wrong and why.
Hall commented: "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.
"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."
The BBC added that John Linwood, its CTO, has been suspended.
