Former Channel 4 CIO describes switching over to consultancy

From its launch in 1982, state-owned but commercially funded broadcaster Channel 4 has done things differently, and the same can be said of its departing CIO Ian Dobb. He's leaving the station to set up his own business, just as the nightly Channel 4 News show is dominated by headlines of business closures and the collapse of the high street and the national economy slows down to levels not seen since Brookside was a small-screen institution.

Dobb doesn't strike you as a rebel who takes great pleasure in going against the grain; he is calm and assured in an understated fashion. As he exits the radical, Richard Rogers-designed Channel 4 HQ, he leaves a post he has held for 10 years. CIOs tend to have short tenures, but again Dobb is different and has been with the company through its transformation into the multi-channel broadcaster, film financier and web publisher it is today.

"I've never been a job hopper," he says. "If you are enjoying it, why leave? Here, the pace of change was so great that it was a great place to work. The challenge of leading the IT function kept me happy throughout the 10 years. Not one year was the same."

Considering the switch from analogue to digital and then throwing the web into the mix, you might think that Dobb has spent the last decade redeveloping the technology needed to push content into the homes of the British public.
"It's mostly been business challenges," he counters. "We brought solutions to the business that they might not have thought of. For example, advertising revenue is our lifeblood - we have done three key overhauls of the ad system that have added four per cent to the firm's revenue."

This involved rewriting the advertising trading system to provide better support for sales teams, and integrating business intelligence analytics into the system.

Unlike the BBC and ITV, Channel 4 doesn't produce content to fill its own schedules. Instead, its remit from the government is to be a publisher of -independently-produced television. As a result, the bulk of Channel 4's budget is spent acquiring content or funding producers, so Dobb and his team created an online system that allows independent producers to submit show concepts for consideration. The system is now a major part of the assessment of the 20,000-plus ideas per year that are submitted.

No matter what vertical sector a business is in, the CIO can at times face a business or technological change that means they don't quite understand how to factor it into their strategic plans. Yet Dobb has been CIO through the most dramatically changing period of all time for television, and nobody in the media would argue that Channel 4 has been anything other than successful in adopting new technology and business models.

"I align myself very closely with the organisation that I am working for. Everything I do is in the best interests of the channel [and] my own brand has not been a focus for me," he says, before lightening the tone: "perhaps to my cost!"

Dobb arrived at Channel 4 shortly after it launched Film4, its first foray into -multi-platform broadcasting. Over the last 10 years his department has been central to the development of ‘red button' interactive TV services and the growing and successful online business which launched catch-up viewing via the web before the BBC released its much-vaunted iPlayer service.

Because Channel 4 has been such a trailblazer in technology, Dobb says that one of the easier aspects of his tenure has been recruiting the right team. "The lure of the Channel 4 brand made it easy to get great people. You don't have to sell the company," he says.

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