Exclusive: Michelle Guthrie’s overhaul, which aims to remove divisions between TV, radio and online, will be unveiled on Tuesday

Twelve months in the making, a small fortune in consultants’ fees and countless “cascade sessions” and leadership principles workshops later, Michelle Guthrie’s Transformation Project will be unveiled on Tuesday.

The ABC board has ticked off on the structure, the communications strategy – which includes not confirming the date – is in place and the message is clear: this is not about job losses, this is about reorganisation.

Led by Guthrie’s handpicked, largely female, executive team, the project will see the ABC silos of television and radio broadcasting – created over the past 85 years – smashed up and rebuilt as a platform-agnostic corporation for the digital age.

Instead of a TV division making television and a radio division making radio programs there will be, for example, an Indigenous unit making Indigenous content for TV, radio and online.

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The corporation will be managed through four pillars, said to be news, investigations and analysis; local and regional; original content; and culture and entertainment.

Leading the transformation has been business transformation expert and corporate consultant Debra Frances.

Frances, who has been brought in-house and given the official title of “head of transformation”, exemplifies the new corporate style of managers at the ABC. The ambitious producers and journalists who once rose to the top to manage the public broadcaster have been replaced by business school graduates without a background in content-making. Of the 11-person executive fewer than half are from a content background, and that includes Guthrie herself, who is a corporate lawyer.

Guthrie also briefly brought in one of Rupert Murdoch’s longtime managers, Jim Rudder, to work on the reorganisation of news operations but he was in and out in less than three months.

Along with Frances, the team includes the chief finance officer, Louise Higgins, who was brought in from Nova Entertainment and the chief digital and information officer, Helen Clifton, who was also hired externally. The director of audiences, Leisa Bacon, and the director of engagement, Samantha Liston, were former managing director Mark Scott appointees who were promoted by Guthrie.

The transformation, according to Guthrie, is essential because: “We are not set up optimally to achieve our audience targets and charter remit.”

There have been signposts the ABC is about to change. In August the broadcaster advertised for a “traffic manager”, a newly created position concerned with directing the content which is produced down the correct street. If the ABC has several staff producing health content, for example, for many platforms, then someone needs to be in charge of steering it in the right direction.

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Audience research has been the driving force of the renewal of Aunty. Coming from a data-driven background at Google, Guthrie is all about research and data on audiences.

“We need to keep building our understanding of audiences,” she told staff earlier in the year. “To step up investment in research/data on audience behaviour and push this insights out to all ABC teams. We then need to use this insight in commissioning decisions and the review of ABC programs and content.”

In her speech to ABC Friends public conference last month Guthrie outlined her one overarching ambition.

“To make the ABC as relevant or more so to my children and their children,” she said. “While the act and charter provide continuity, relevance cannot be guaranteed.

“As history has shown, the ABC must constantly adapt to technology, to audience trends, to funding pressures, to ensure it delivers for all Australians. What I want is to maintain the role of the ABC as Australia’s most important cultural institution: to link the past, the present and the future.”