Corporation is creating an interoperable IT infrastructure

The BBC is introducing a programme to create an interoperable IT infrastructure and lay the foundations for a move to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The Digital Fabric plan will assess the corporation’s top 200 applications and introduce an enterprise architecture integration layer to allow legacy and future technologies to work together.

Vendor Siemens Business Services, which has a £2bn contract to operate the BBC’s technology, will deploy the IBM WebSphere middleware technology as a basis for SOA.

The programme will ultimately reduce the total cost of ownership, create a more unified organisation, reduce the number of applications and improve service delivery, by allowing workers to share information and technologies across all sites.

‘The infrastructure rollout will take place over the next nine years. We are looking at our applications and how to rationalise them,’ said Keith Little, the BBC’s chief technology officer.

There is no big-bang approach to introducing interoperability, but point-to-point interfaces between silo-based systems will eventually be eradicated.

‘You cannot change legacy applications overnight, but strategic new applications will work with our enterprise architecture,’ said Little.

‘We need an integrated architecture so that metadata can flow across different areas of the organisation to give us flexibility around process changes and reduce the cost of change from a technology perspective.’