BBC CIO Tiffany Hall is setting standards and building platforms

Tiffany Hall rose through the ranks in the back offices of the BBC, spending many years as head of business systems in news before making the news herself with her appointment as CIO in October 2009.

The 15-year veteran of the Corporation is now charged with creating an IP fasttrack for the business, robust enough to handle the corporation's transition from tape to video. At the same time, she is faced with the double whammy of driving innovation at the BBC and among its suppliers while having to pay attention to refreshing the legacy business systems infrastructure, which has been sliding down the list of Corporation priorities in recent years.

Hall appears unfazed by her to-do list and brings heavyweight experience to the role. "I have been embedded in the programme-making areas so I am in touch with the way in which we are using our technology to make our content," she says.

"As we go forward into a much more IP-enabled world the extent to which the BBC is using its IP infrastructure for programme-making purposes is increasing quite significantly and I think that was a factor in my appointment.

Hall joined from Shell in 1995. "My background, before I joined the BBC, was more in the traditional IT space. I worked on business systems, financial systems and the like, which is perhaps more relevant to some parts of my role now," she says.

She was taken on as an IT project manager at the Beeb but was soon appointed head of business systems in News. In 2006 she became the technology controller, BBC Nations & Regions and focused on tapeless broadcast environments, launching BBC Northern Ireland's Digital NI project.

The role of the CIO at the BBC is a slicing and dicing of many of the traditional CIO functions. "Though it is a CIO job title the scope isn't necessarily what you would traditionally see, so within Future Media & Technology, there are colleagues of mine on the senior leadership team who deal with all the audience-facing technologies and I deal with all the technologies that are delivered to support the BBC staff in making the content and running the business," says Hall.

"The other key distinction between this role and other CIOs is that there is a CTO above me. IT and IS are a very important component of what the BBC does with its technology but so are studios and cameras and graphics and all the other stuff, so I am subsumed within that CTO function."

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