With the broadcaster still reeling from the crisis sparked by revelations surrounding disgraced presenter Jimmy Savile, it’s not been an easy few months for the BBC. Now, in a highly embarrassing turn of events, the Corporation has decided to scrap its Digital Media Initiative (DMI) after spending £98.4m.

Established in 2008, the DMI was devised to create new digital production tools and link them with a central digital archive, allowing BBC staff to access a seamless digital chain throughout the production process.

The key individual components of DMI were to have been: new production tools that could be used to create content digitally on a desktop; a store to house the newly-created digital content; a database to search BBC archives, and a place to store production reports digitally.

An operational review of the project was initiated last October. The decision to abandon it altogether was taken by BBC director-general Tony Hall, who took up the position in April after his predecessor, George Entwistle, lasted a mere 54 days in the job.

The DMI project, admits Hall, “has wasted a huge amount of Licence Fee payers’ money, and I saw no reason to allow that to continue, which is why I have closed it.

“I have serious concerns about how we managed this project and the review that has been set up [by the BBC Trust] is designed to find out what went wrong and what lessons can be learned. Ambitious technology projects like this always carry a risk of failure; it does not mean we should not attempt them but we have a responsibility to keep them under much greater control than we did here.”