Tomorrow's World
This post is part of the tenth birthday celebrations of bbc.co.uk.
If nostalgia is not your bag, then read no further!
I remember vividly my first encounter with the internet. It was in 1995, and took place fittingly in the office of , who was then the editor of Tomorrow's and who was to become launch director for bbc.co.uk.
I had asked him to explain the internet to me. He showed me what I now know to be a website and said excitedly: "It's amazing, There is this huge warehouse full of books somewhere in the US. You can order any book you want from this computer and it will be sent to you."
It's impossible for me now to remember what a world without was like. It was the first place I conducted an internet transaction and is one of my four most used websites. Though I haven't yet cracked the problem of owning more books than my bookshelves can accommodate - and no, I haven't read them all and never will.
But back to the early days. My second clear memory was a couple of years later; I was in charge of launching the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's first digital entertainment channel, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Choice. I recall a meeting in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's council chamber of a number of "digital friendly" senior creative leaders, being encouraged to share their knowledge of the web (which took abut five minutes) and to hear from Edward and his strategy team about the upcoming launch of bbc.co.uk.
We were all asked to name a favourite website. I talked about ; Jana Bennett talked abut an auction site that came out of San Francisco. It was the first time I'd heard of - and it was to be another six years before I conducted a transaction on it. (A garden tent if you must know and I got two for the price of one owing to a delivery cock-up). The startling thing about that show-and-tell ten years ago was that most of us were naming sites that are now as well-known as any on the web - and yet we hadn't heard of each other's favourites.
Because I was running Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Choice, I was one of a select group of people invited to attend a vast number of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ meetings running up to the launch of our portfolio of digital services including bbc.co.uk.
My own launch was a year off but I was able to observe the harassed looks on the faces of Edward and his increasingly huge army of external advisors and project managers. In classic Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ style, the nearer the launch got the more people were thrown at it which - as I was to discover myself a year later - is not the answer.
To launch hassle-free in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ you need to be left to your own devices, allowed to handpick a team of experienced people (little hope of that for web work back in 1997) and be left to get on with it. The launch of bbc.co.uk was in the full glare of the management headlights with little of the basic support a team needs - and none of the systems and processes in place for running a large website. But it launched and has thrived since.
Fast forward four years and I find I am in charge of bbc.co.uk myself, as Controller of New Media. It is 2001, and by this time the design of the site is looking a little tired and the navigation is not as helpful as it could be. My task is to relaunch the site under the umbrella brand of Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔi, which is to be applied to all our interactive services, on the web, TV and mobile.
Interestingly, this is an idea that John Birt had had in the late 1990s but which had been resisted - it later transpires for good reasons - by the web team. The brand didn't last long on the web, but the move to a wider page and the introduction of the navigation bar were highly successful.
For once, the main site seemed to be ahead of its brother in News; I remember one or two meetings with colleagues there where resistance to the wider page was quite strong, although they came round in time (and I'd bet good money that they wouldn't remember quite the same version of events!).
Sadly, too much of my job was about trying to broker peace between the various web factions in the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ. Our project manager and Head of Design Steve Rogers were invaluable and talented allies in this but I believe that the factionalism did our users no favours, and cost the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ dearly in terms of flexibility and time/money.
Stains of the blood that had been spilled in the very early days of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's venture onto the internet remain to this day on metaphorical carpets around the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ and occasionally I hear tell of efforts to eradicate it, or even a short outbreak of tribal warfare.
It's inevitable that when you need to introduce to an organisation like the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ the scale of change that we needed in the 1990s, resistance will manifest itself as territorialism. Now we have a chance, ten years on, to look back on and learn from both our successes and our failures.
I hope this will be a chance to reflect on how in the future we can work ever more co-operatively across our organisational boundaries, in order to serve better our millions of users.
Katharine Everett is former Controller of New Media.
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