Sharepoint City Case Study The BBC. i

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1 Sharepoint City Case Study The BBC. i The BBC in Transition The BBC News Group is very diverse and very widely distributed. Besides headquarters in London, it has bureaux across the UK and around the world. It produces a vast array of output in text, video and audio across multiple networks on a local, national and international level. This size and scale can provide the organisation with huge advantages. But it can also create problems. As with many larger organisations, it can be hard to avoid a silo mentality. It has multiple systems and multiple pockets and places for storing information. So it can be difficult for people to discover that content unless a journalist knows where to look. Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC Global News, put it succinctly: We don t know what we know. In other words, a piece of editorial or logistical information gleaned by one part of the organisation can take too long to be shared with other areas [indeed, it may only be shared by being broadcast]. Multiple systems can create inefficiencies. Journalists can often be doing the same thing or working on the same story, unaware of what is going on in other areas. Other challenges are emerging. News organisations have been heavily reliant on news agencies to supply them with accurate information. But the array of potential sources is now vast - and growing. So there is a growing need for systems that can analyse that material and bring meaning to it. In mid-2010 the BBC set out to design a Journalism Portal a system to promote and facilitate sharing and collaboration, enhance planning and communications across organisational or geographical boundaries, increase efficiency and smarter allocation of resources and improve the quality of output. The aim was also to build a flexible and living system that can change as the organisation and the process of producing news changes. Sharepoint City: the technical development skill behind the portal This project was a great challenge, says Pauli Visuri, Consulting Director of Sharepoint City. The scope of use was enormous and project goals, such as culture change are complex and ambitious. Added to this there were few if any precedents to such a system, or many of its required line-of-business applications and functionalities. There were just so many unknowns.

2 IBM s WebSphere portal with Lucerne search and a custom java implementation were the nearest competitor. And the BBC was technically geared up to implement it. However, Microsoft SharePoint s demonstrable out of the box (OOTB) functionality combined with a huge amount of in-house goodwill generated by 12 months of rapidly deployed agile pilot projects won out. A team of 10 SharePoint solution architects, developers, functional consultants and testers worked as one with the BBC s Product team to build and roll-out solutions quickly across dozens of business areas and communities, getting validation of the functionality on the way. A customised Sharepoint 2010 based solution provokes transformation The Portal is an internal web-based tool for the creation and aggregation of editorial information for all journalists in the BBC, built on Microsoft SharePoint It draws on the principles of collaborative applications, bringing people together into editorial communities of common interest providing information of relevance to them, and is designed to be flexible and adaptable to meet new needs as they arise. It comprises a range of different applications, some of broad relevance to many users, others focussed on specific needs. These first solutions were implemented predominantly using SharePoint s OOTB capabilities: collaboration sites and lists, diaries, forums and feeds (few were documents, as news is mainly short text). A key enabler was the metadata capabilities of SharePoint 2010: Metadata-based aggregation enabled us to highlight breaking stories to the user, forecasting the day s hot stories much in the way the Weather team across the room from us was forecasting weather, says Stuart Fieldhouse, Principal Solution Architect at Sharepoint City. Some of the most innovative applications and functionality of the Portal include story and context-aware discussion flows ( Story Chats ) directly embedded on pages; enabling journalists to send breaking stories from their mobiles, with the system determining whether editorial approval is required, or whether the sender is pre-approved for publishing ( Quickfire ); or an application enabling users to send messages to editors and teams by their role / rota schedule ( Role-based messaging ) rather than having to know who the individual in the role is at a given time. Once we had a good level of confidence from testing we could boost these early iterations with custom enhancements, add-on functionality and service applications, for example enhanced usability, unique functionality or integrations with existing systems Says Pauli.

3 Over those 12 months Sharepoint designed a new software development strategy to ensure the project s success. Rapid iterations of a functional prototype were the natural way to approach the challenge, and Microsoft SharePoint s OOTB capabilities were a perfect fit. We decided to call the approach Developing Together and it has proven hugely successful. We release extra functionality live to the system in regular weekly deployments and updates. It saved 12 months of programme time and got an arguably better result for the BBC says Pauli. This ability to meet the users expectations almost on demand has helped the Product Managers and Trainers to win over the users, gaining trust and acceptance of what are inevitably difficult changes to their established practices and ways of working. Even amongst the BBC s own exemplary project record, the Portal team has been praised as best ever "The software, the underlying infrastructure and the entire product end-to-end has had to be Agile in all senses of the word. The BBC needed a product, and a programme to deliver it, that was as dynamic as the industry it was supporting." Kieran Harvey, Head of Technical Delivery, BBC Journalism Portal The most successful plans and programmes cannot foresee every eventuality. The higher than expected peak usage of the system started to cause performance problems. A joint troubleshooting and optimisation exercise between the BBC, its infrastructure suppliers, Microsoft, and SharePoint City tracked down the problem to an authentication issue affecting the load-balancing. Once found getting the portal working as intended was accomplished quickly. The BBC was happy with the speed of the fix, and the lessons learned have been carried over to other projects. We owe it to our audience to offer them the very best of what we do not just what one journalist or team knows. There s a massive opportunity in ensuring that the best material we have is shared across the organization The Portal gives all our journalists and therefore all our audiences - access to the full range. Helen Boaden, Director of BBC News Group

4 Improved output Quality The Journalism Portal is already seen by the BBC as enhancing the quality of the output it is able to provide by providing faster, better information to its journalists: What makes our journalism great? Yes, it s about having the right facts and information. But it s also about being fast and timely. So the more easily we are able to move around knowledge, information and nuggets of content to teams wherever they happen to be, the better our journalism will be. That s what the Portal allows us to do. Mary Hockaday, Head of the BBC Newsroom To measure the savings, the Portal contains a unique Benefits Dashboard, providing graphical analysis of the sharing and re-use of resources through the Portal and thus the reduced duplication of effort and resources which directly attributable to hard money. Cost Reduction & Increased productivity The BBC expects to recoup it s [ 10M] investment in the portal in full through more efficient ways of working, integration of departments, time and resource savings, increased efficiency in planning and multi-platform commissioning.. One of the key aims is to make much more use of shared building blocks of content and information which can be quickly and easily shared, refined or re-versioned. In a recent staff survey, a majority of the staff using the Portal said it was making their job easier and finding information quicker. This in turn allows them to spend more time concentrating on the quality of the output.

5 Culture Change Journalists are traditionally cautious about sharing ideas and knowledge outside their immediate area, and the Journalism Portal represents at least as much of a cultural change as it does a technical one. It is a new and different way of working, which is helping to foster a culture of collaboration and sharing, a change which the BBC sees as necessary to achieve its strategic objectives, such as the moves to new HQs in Central London and Salford. Programmes are realising that the value they get from sharing outweighs the risk, Simon Andrewes, Programme Director One of the things we ve discovered here is that once people work with the portal they get it its advantages are just so clear the convincing comes in the use Mariita Eager, Head of Change for BBC Global News So if you need to liberate knowledge and encourage collaboration, love Sharepoint but want more, contact us on +44 (0) or via contact@sharepointcity.co.uk. Tell us what you re looking for and we ll give you a good idea of how you can get it quickly and affordably. i The highlighted sections are from the 2011 BBC Industry White Paper The BBC Journalism Portal and the Future of Newsroom Production Tools. Found online at last accessed 26 March 2011.