The CBC’s digital and business development department, essentially the guys responsible for a many of the cool clickity-click projects, a lot of CBC’s online presence, and some of the corporation’s business strategy, is being broken up and split into two units.

The re-organization left Steve Billinger, a key executive during Richard Stursberg’s tenure at the CBC, without a position.

His department will now be split into two units, a revenue unit will fall under to the CBC’s sales and marketing department, while the digital unit will fall under the media operations and technology unit. About 100 staff members are being shifted around as part of the re-organization.

Kirstine Stewart, Interim Executive Vice President of English Services, indicated on the internal employee portal that the move was made to better serve programming objectives. “By consolidating our operations we are better able to react quickly and take advantage of technology changes which benefit all areas of CBC. Digital is not to be viewed as separate; it is in fact central to how we conceive and deliver the best-made programming in Canada,” she said.

The move comes after a similar overhaul was pushed through the CBC’s French services, in which some members of the digital department were assigned to the sales and marketing end of the business. Some insiders think the success of that move prompted the re-organization on the English side of the house.

	24 Comments »	Email This Post
	Behind the Scenes, I.T.	Posted at 6:34 am (30 Sep 2010)

Cedric Sam, an IT analyst with radio-canada.ca, has developed a custom electoral map using Google’s satellite imagery.

As you can see from the picture above, Sam used customized electoral maps and overlaid them on top of Google Earth’s satellite imagery. The technique was used once on-air for the federal election, and then several times for the recent Quebec provincial election.

To make it work Sam collected geographical and elections data from provincial and government sources and then feed it into a database. Then he incorporated the live elections results, and crunched it together to represent the ridings. “At each moment during the evening, by a click on the script, I could generate a fresh map with current data colored with the party in advance or elected in any given riding,” he said.

“The coolest map that we generated that night was that of parties finishing third in each riding. In a single shot, [we were] able to show how Quebec effectively returned to a two-party system with a map almost entirely colored in pale blue, the color representing Mario Dumont’s ADQ.”

Given that the next election is probably around the corner, this seems like a great application for the Canada Votes pages. To watch a Youtube video of the on-air presentation, click here.

	2 Comments »	Email This Post
	Behind the Scenes, I.T., News & Journalism	Posted at 1:11 pm (11 Dec 2008)

CBC’s network briefly blocked employees from from visiting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace this morning. Also, some personal blogs, like John Gushue‘s and the popular anonymous Teamakers blog were not accessible.

John Mang, operations manager for B.C. radio said: “It looks like was was a technical glitch. It was certainly unintentional. One phone call and it is being fixed.”

Ray Carnovale, head of CBC’s I.T. confirmed that and said the blockage “may be something going on external to us.”

All regions should have access to all those sites again.

What I think was interesting was just how fast news spread in the Corporation. I was on-air at the time and was getting dozens of CBC folks emailing me within the space of an hour. It spread quickly within the Vancouver radio newsroom and, presumably, others.

	23 Comments »	Email This Post
	I.T., Workstations and Desktops	Posted at 10:27 am (31 Oct 2007)

CBC/Radio-Canada is training its Information Technology staff with a simulation game that recreates the Apollo 13 space mission.

But rather than training on how to survive on space food and moving efficiently through cramped quarters — both skills that CBC’s I.T. team has already mastered — the training puts staff in events and situations that correlate with incident, problem and capacity management.

“One of the biggest benefits of it was the team building aspect,” Fiona Soward, service manager for technology and quality of services at CBC/Radio-Canada, said. “Sometimes, we had people in different roles that they wouldn’t normally play within the organization. We would have senior management at a potentially lower position, so it’s interesting to see how they perceive the work being done at that level.”

From IT World:

The simulation, offered by Montreal-based Nexio Technologies, is a mix of screen projections which takes users through the different stages of the game, as well as direction from an instructor who drives the problems that occur during the flight.

“The users will play the role of mission control,” Stephen Goulet, vice-president of research and development at Nexio Technologies, said. “They will go through different incidents that will cause problems. They need to manage costs and make decisions in order to meet my expectations as mission director.”

More

	4 Comments »	Email This Post
	I.T.	Posted at 6:55 pm (06 Sep 2007)

There are 1,163 CBC employees and regular freelancers who have accounts on Facebook as of today. That’s about 12% of the CBC’s workforce, including Radio-Canada.

Today, IT security firm Sophos said that 50 percent of workers are being blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers who are worried about the website’s impact on productivity and security, and have therefore put policies or access controls in place to ban its use in the workplace.

	9 Comments »	Email This Post
	I.T., Workstations and Desktops	Posted at 1:35 pm (21 Aug 2007)