A vision for the future: out with the old at ITV

Allowing business owners to see how the technology stack works has helped break down barriers

Buzzphrase du jour ‘digital transformation' encompasses a whole range of other technology and business vernacular including Agile, Lean, DevOps and continuous improvement. One of the most important is cross-functional collaboration.

At the New Relic Future Stack event in London on Wednesday, Andrew Duncan, principle engineer at ITV, explained how the impetus for many of the changes being rolled out across the broadcaster's advertising platform often comes from the business, not in the usual "we want this thing and we want it now", kind of way, but instead making suggestions as a result of having visibility into the system.

"We gave the business owners New Relic accounts on go-live and they just kept using them," Duncan told Computing. "They started to teach themselves insight queries, and suddenly they were leading the discussion, they were saying 'we're seeing this and we want to know what it means'. So, the tool became an exploration of the business processes, not just the software."

It was not always this way. Duncan's team has just completed a five-year upgrade of the systems that support ITV's TV advertising, from the initial deals with advertisers, to creating schedules, to predicting returns through to invoicing. Parts of the system dated back to the days of independent regional franchises like Granada and Tyne-Tees Television which were merged into ITV in the early 2000s so there was quite a lot of baggage to deal with.

New Relic was brought in towards the end of that overhaul initially as a monitoring tool in order to persuade the dubious business owners that the new systems would perform as promised.

Another characteristic of digital transformation is that it's never truly over. "One way to look at it is there are things we'll never have to do again," said Duncan.

So the heavy lifting is now over and the team can take a breath and think about its next moves. One is to move some applications into the cloud. Duncan plans to use all of the top three platforms: GCP for analytics; Azure for Windows applications; and AWS for other workloads. And they will be ticking off some other digital to-dos as well, a significant one being DevOps.

"I'm a huge advocate of DevOps. I think that's really the way to do things now," Duncan said. "I'm also a huge fan of serverless. If someone isn't using a piece of software it shouldn't cost us any money."

The main reason these things haven't happened yet, apart from the usual large-company complexity, is that the team has been focused on delivering the deadline, he said. There is also some more work required to get the systems into a cloud-ready condition. "There are still a couple of monoliths kicking around that we need to decompose into understandable chunks", said Duncan.

At this stage though, having modernised the platforms there is a need to understand the landscape and how everything fits together.

"Our big thrust now is to go into end-to-end, across the department. What are our processes, how do they interact, what are they, what are the boundaries there," Duncan said.

"We want to make more quantitative judgments about all the work we do and see what the value of the work is, so New Relic will help with this, along with impact mapping and things like that. The bottom line is we want to get more advertising revenue for ITV and deliver it more efficiently."