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Big T, Little T - Should 'Engineering' Be Different Than 'IT?'
February 5, 2019
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. Engineering was once a complex world of soldering irons, replacing pinch wheels on cart machines, complex wiring looms, DAT machines, and much more: but increasingly, a studio is a set of computers linked together, and minimal other equipment - certainly unlikely to be user-serviceable. Engineering, in many ways, is now - mainly - an in-house specialist IT department
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In 2007, I started working for the BBC in London, in something then known as Future Media and Technology, and almost as soon as I started, I was told of a split within the organization's technology teams that I should be aware of. There were, in essence, two different teams - known as "Big T" and "Little T."
"Big T" was Technology with a capital T. The sort of technology that cost lots of money. Transmitters, studio systems, radio cars, cameras, CD players, all that sort of thing. "Big T" was an integral part of the BBC, in fact, the largest office when Broadcasting House was build was the Chief Engineer's, so I was told, not the Director General's. When pressed, after a few beers the "Big T" people would all agree that really the BBC was a broadcast engineering company with some programmers using their nice equipment.
"Little T" was technology with a small T. The sort of technology like laptops, websites, webcams, perl scripts, email systems, and all that. Anything involved with the web, particularly, was "Little T."
This split used to be relatively common in many radio stations and radio groups; and it's the sort of split that becomes quite difficult to deal with for people in the intersection of the two.
"Big T" has big budgets, big responsibilities and very long lead times. It speaks the language of broadcast redundancy and caution. "Little T" has smaller budgets, but is often required to move at internet speed. Often it can't do a job with the same resiliency as "Big T." So the clash is real.
Is running the streaming infrastructure for your radio station the job of IT or Engineering? It's audio and connects to "Big T," so it's engineering, perhaps; but it's computers and interfaces with the consumer internet, so it's also "Little T." Who ends up doing that? You want to get audio files off the playout system ("Big T") and then encode them and upload them to an audio server ("Little T"). You want to check which studio is on-air ("Big T") to switch the webcam feed for the website ("Little T"). Then there are those parts of broadcast infrastructure where "Little T" and "Big T" intersect, too - what data goes on an RDS encoder, or the DAB DLS?
Engineering was once a complex world of soldering irons, replacing pinch wheels on cart machines, complex wiring looms, DAT machines, and much more: but increasingly, a studio is a set of computers linked together, and minimal other equipment - certainly unlikely to be user-serviceable. Engineering, in many ways, is now - mainly - an in-house specialist IT department.
The brighter radio groups have recognized this - and now have single IT departments who might be supporting a sales database one day, and a broadcast playout system the next. They'll probably have some RF engineers on staff (or on contract), but IT is now a function across the company. In my experience (and I've seen this now in a number of different radio groups), having one team rather than two has been a tremendous step for efficiency and new ways of thinking.
If you have an Engineering department and an IT department, perhaps it's worth rethinking that. I'd recommend merging "Big T" and "Little T" - good things happen when people work together.
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