BBC to spaff £18 MILLION of licence fee cash... on BIG DATA The Beeb is planing to chuck up to £18m worth of licence fee payers' cash at data analytics suppliers to work their dark arts at the corporation. A tender for a three-year Next Generation Digital Analytics Services agreement appeared in the Official Journal of the European Union* at the weekend. "The BBC is looking for a …
> £18m ... for a three-year Next Generation Digital Analytics
So £6M year. That makes it large enough to be noticed, yet small enough to be able to bury in the detail when it all goes terribly wrong.
Hopefully they haven't made the beginner's error of stating up-front what benefits they hope to get from this (or even worse: having some measurable targets). However it all sounds airy-fairy enough that they'll be able to take whatever this collection of buzzwords produces and say that that's what they expected to get from it.
I think you mean "taxpayers", not "customers".
When paying a TV license becomes optional, and people aren't harassed and intimidated into paying, even if they never watch TV, by TVL goons who insist that you must be a TV viewer and then demand that you pay their protection money, then you might rightly call us "customers", but as things stand we're far more like taxpayers, in the antiquated sense of private fiefdoms and feudalism, rather than the democratic sense.
Surely if the BBC really wants to know "who we are", for whatever unfathomable reason, they can just look at the extensive database that their TVL protection racket maintains so religiously.
... what percentage of customers are driven away by analytics?
When analytics consultants infest a website, the website suddenly requires javascript. If the javascript works at all it is slower than a squashed slug and some twit puts an animations all over the pages to make it difficult to read the text.
Funnily enough I'm currently waist deep in a situation with, I think, the exact same intended outcome. Except we have realised there absolutely no turn-key solution.
Instead we are building small and learning as we go. And boy, these systems (web analytics, CRM, ad servers, affiliate platforms, CMSs etc) seem designed to avoid talking to each other.
The sheer hubris of Auntie believing they can SOLVE this with one RFP is quite something.
And WTF is big data anyway in this context?? I bet some dick consultant will proclaim "a data warehouse we need, and big it must be". "Big data" makes me reach for the oxygen mask every time...
The TV licence is entirely optional (even if you do own a TV) and I'm glad I don't pay it seeing as this is how "my BBC" is spunking its cash away. The "agents" have absolutely no legal right of entry to your property to check up on you either - unless they have obtained a court order legally based on the balance of probabilities, or have committed perjury to obtain one by falsely completing their survey report.
There is an ever growing body of knowledge on the internet about how to entirely legally watch your TV without a licence - in fact, it is clearly stated on the licencing website itself; and also about how to deal with the Crapita goon-squad if they arrive at your door.
As for the BBC project itself - err... it kind of beggars belief really. "Big data" MEH!!! Whoever has bought into this shite with public money needs shooting.
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