This is the blog of Ant Miller, senior research manager and dilettante geek at large at the BBC.
I wail moan and cuss about the challenges and fun to be found here.
These are my personal opinions, and not those of my employer. Or anyone else here for that matter.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

A big question

Struck me the other day walking in the sunshine;

Why should the decendants of the best gamblers get to consume the majority of the worlds resources?

It sounds extraordinary when put like that doesn't it? But in essence this is the situation that capitlism leads us to. Gamble on life, and win, and you get the lions share of the goodies. Inheritance of material wealth has taken a fairly simple principle with real benefits and turned it into an incredibly skewed social model, and much of the principle of modern government and statehood in the west at least is predicated on preserving just those inherited wealth mechanisms.

Clear as Mud

Last week I was invited along to a meeting to explore how we could work better with our outsourced IT people. It's a couple of years since the controvercial sell off of what was a large and rather specialised department, and it would be fair to say it's been a mixed couple of years. Not least because a whole new dept was created to manage the relationship, and it did feel that a certain degree of difficulties were associate with that.

Anyway, all the mal-communication and horridness is, I hope, behind us, and in the hallowed halls of the English Speaking Union, just off Berkley Square (a perculiarly old school institution, and a most odd choice of venue we sat and met with the Siemens and BBC technology group people who are 'here to help'.

Umm, not really sure what they told us on reflection. There is a lot to be told (and I couldn't put it all in a blog post), but the picture I got was of a cake half baked. Whatever they have done to the BBCT that was, they're not finished doing it, as the org chart I saw was full of abitrary and rather opaque structural distinctions. I have notes that read like an attack of Accronymitis- ORS SRS TIAG etc.

They tried bless them, but there is no big picture shown, and no one who seems to have the confidence to describe it. Still chinks in the armour did appear, so better keep pluging away.