YouView today is an autonomous company formed from a consortium of seven partners, including the UK’s main terrestrial broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5), two ISPs (BT and TalkTalk), and a network services provider, Arqiva. YouView has not been created to generate profits in its own right, but rather to be the heart of a commercial ecosystem. To achieve this goal it has established itself as a separate business from its consortium partners.
The organisational complexity of creating this new type of business was reflected by the rapid growth in its internal headcount and external partnerships. Having started out with a workforce consisting of a handful of talented BBC broadcast engineers, YouView now has a global pool of specialists, together with its own values, management structures and independent governance, all housed under one roof. Creating YouView has required deep skills and experience in organisational design, stakeholder management, change and journey management.
Alongside moulding and shaping an organisation that has multiple partners and contributing third parties, developing the technical platform for YouView presented a need to manage, align and integrate a series of highly complex and interdependent initiatives and technologies. To deliver its vision, YouView must work on a multitude of different technology devices, and integrate and operate with platforms from content providers and ISPs. That’s in addition to being able to accommodate new content and technology partners as the service evolves. All this has involved ensuring that many different parallel strands of activity are progressing effectively together throughout development, into delivery and beyond in operations.
Designing and delivering a technology platform in a multi-partner, multi-technology ecosystem with so many different ‘moving parts’ was a formidable task. Overcoming these problems has demanded a wide range of industry, technical and operational capabilities – that Accenture has been able to provide.