Thompson: BBC faces ongoing change
To be honest I'm not entirely sure that Mark Thompson is fully aware or even prepared for the possible long term consequences of what he is proposing for the BBC, or indeed whether the planned changes will end up destabilising the BBC instead of enhancing it. The greater the change, the greater the risk of an overlooked drawback causing serious damage.
A broad vision of change needs a thorough understanding of how the organisation will behave as a result of those changes, and if any elements of that change are misjudged then the consequences could potentially be devastating. The BBC has already been subjected to numerous audits over the years so a major overhaul appears to be the only possible option.
However despite recent reforms there may still be genuine scope for change within the BBC as it stands, especially when relating to various elements of middle management which are leftovers from the John Birt era, but whether this issue will be properly addressed instead of being masked by a pile of excessive redundancies remains to be seen.
Middle management notwithstanding, trying to get the proposed level of 'value for money' out of the BBC as it stands will be very difficult without some major sacrifices, and it's hard to see how £3.3bn can be saved by March next year without a significant reduction in the quality of service that the BBC currently provides.
One very controversial measure would be for the BBC to cut back on broadcasting hours for BBC One and BBC Two. Such a move may be unthinkable at the present time but I can honestly see no workable alternatives for producing that level of saving in the short term without drastically reducing the quality of the BBC's output in general to unacceptably low levels.
As for the implied reasons for continued change, the pace of technological development is something of a red herring in that the BBC is already producing programmes that have the potential to be viewed using any number of methods and that the delivery methods used are only one part of the equation, as long as the licence fee caters for them.
Mark Thompson may be right when he says that the BBC will be subjected to ongoing changes, but I strongly suspect that there will ultimately be one major change which will have widespread support within the BBC: Mark Thompson losing his job.
