From the BBC Internet blog, which offers insights into how the corporation is changing for a digital world:

2008 will become the breakthrough year for the BBC’s interactive audience facing services. The biggest ticket item we are working on is a complete refresh of our backend infrastructure. While this is fairly boring stuff for the average consumer, without it, we cannot move things forward.

It is true that the average person is bamboozled by talk of “backend infrastructure”, but the post identifies one of the key challenges facing big organisations going through a period of transition.

In many cases, the technological support to shift to a digital environment simply isn’t there. In the case of the BBC, it has a well established broadcast network. But the Internet is a brave new world.

In the early days of BBCNews.com, when I was a news editor there, we had to set up our own technical team, with our own technical network.

The existing BBC IT system was not set up to support content management systems, live streaming and the like. And it certainly wasn’t prepared to response to problems like crashes of the publishing system within minutes.

Much has changed since 1997 when the site first launched. There is still much to do, with the existing online news publishing system creaking under the strain of 10 years of rapid growth.

Most journalists would feel lost in a discussion about “backend infrastructure”. However, technology, media and content are inextricably linked.

Editors and journalists should take an active interest in learning about the systems that are going to enable them to create new forms of digital journalism.

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