A post deriding the BBC’s reliance on Siemens has made a few waves, being picked up on Daring Fireball and Kottke.org. Unfortunately I think it’s being rather unfair to Siemens.
I worked at the BBC from 1998 to 2000, in the Internet Ops end of things, just before the whole outsourcing to Siemens happened - in fact many of the people who were outsourced previously reported directly to me.
When I worked there the architecture consisted of a bunch of Sun E450s running Solaris and Apache, with Perl CGIs. HTML was coded by hand, in a variety of editing tools from Notepad.exe to the horrendous WYSIWYG tools that were available then. There was no content production or management system, and no infrastructure for any sort of dynamic behaviour, other than CGIs written in Perl, which my team had to individually check by eye, line by line.
I am unsurprised that this situation is still the case. The BBC as an organisation was utterly incapable of dealing with change, and there was no appreciation of technology at a management level. There were some attempts to introduce new infrastructure. While I was there BBC Online tried and failed to (1) purchase Vignette (which they thankfully failed to do, since it’s awful - but only because of the ludicrous price Vignette were asking), and (2) build their own CMS (well they hired a third party agency to build it), which failed completely at huge cost.
The real cause of all the problems, I think, was a failure of leadership at the highest levels. Nobody in BBC Online had the capability or the motivation to engage properly with the architecture problem. For those who did try it was the end of their BBC careers - the culture there is focused entirely on blame, either avoidance or casting of. In my time there I rarely saw an agenda for a meeting, and there were certainly never any minutes! My god, you’d not want to be caught in the presence of a decision, you might get blamed for it later.
The continuing failure of the BBC to achieve the stuff that most Internet publishers could do in their sleep was appreciated by those involved, but it was blamed on personalities and individuals. They missed the organisation’s continual failure to appreciate technology as core to their enterprise, rather than some bit of facilities you can ignore. Technology is central to the BBC’s business, if only they’d be willing to engage with it and lead as they are capable of.
Back to the original post. The author contends that had the BBC been running the architecture it would have managed to update it. Well, certainly not the BBC I worked for - they’d still bickering over deckchair positions.
Back in my consultant days we ran into customers that had Siemens running some aspect of a project pretty frequently. The system in question was some sort of out-dated propriety Siemens technology that the customer had been convinced they needed to cling to as if life depended on it. We were usually being asked to come in and rescue the project in some way. Generally what would happen is that we’d point out that the reason the project needed rescuing was the reliance on whatever crap system Siemens had sold them and that they should run away from it as quickly as they could. Usually the customer would freak out at this point and run to Siemens with more money.
I wish I had the brain washing ability that they have…
It wouldn’t surprise me if Siemens were generally pretty useless - the BBC case is a bit odd, since a lot of the staff running the BBC service are ex-BBC employees who were transferred over in outsourcing.
I’ve not worked with Siemens myself - my only contact with them is they made a mobile phone I once owned that I rather liked