Admittedly, the last few days may well have been a bit out of the norm at the BBC, but CIO UK has a couple of interesting articles about the priorities of Tiffany Hall, BBC CIO.

The first article is a brief ‘day in the life‘ – the kind of piece that’s always worth bearing in mind in planning techniques that could realistically fit within a decision-maker’s daily routine. It’s interesting to see further proof of our own research into the challenges of persuading senior contacts to attend events. We found that senior decision-makers receive an average of one invite every day but only attend 5 in a whole year – meaning that the content, topic and invitation process has to be spot-on. Tiffany seems to be at around the average for invitations but above average for attendance!

“Evening I have been invited to more work dinners since I started this job than the entire rest of my career. I could be dining out every night of the week.”

The second, longer, article goes into more details around current BBC IT challenges and priorities. It discusses some of 2010’s headline issues of information management, standardisation and consumerisation of IT, and also references some of the ‘day to day’ projects that seem to be rising up CIO agendas this year:

“We have reached the stage in the lifecycle of our legacy business systems when we are having a good, long, hard look at that and seeing whether now is the time to divert some of our priorities back into the business systems infrastructure…This hasn’t been a great focus for my predecessors over the last few years, simply because of where the BBC’s priorities were. I am getting a very clear steer from my stakeholders out there in the BBC business that, much as they want to put the money into costume dramas and all the rest of it, we do need some better back-office functions. Traditional back-office stuff around Outlook, when are we going to Windows 7… all of that stuff is very much on the radar.”