THE larger the IT project, the greater the potential for pratfalls. The lesson is learned painfully by many managers, though not often as publicly as the BBC, which now admits that a failed project to create an ambitious digital content management system, entitled the Digitial Media Initiative (DMI) had to be scrapped after costing £98.4 million ($152 million.) The loss of so much licence-fee money on a single miscalculated scheme has implications extending well beyond the current embarrassment of the BBC's governing Trust and the broadcaster's managers. In comparison to, say, the crisis unleashed by allegations of decades of sexual abuse by the late Jimmy Savile, once a prominent star in TV schedules, the DMI story has felt rather like a slow-burning crisis. So slow in fact, that insiders referred to the doomed project with the wry acronym Don't Mention It. Now the digging into what went wrong begins, as the National Audit Office, which monitors public expenditure and the Commons Public Accounts Committee, start their hearings into the matter.

IT projects gone awry because they were conceived on too massive a scale, and good money thrown after bad, are financial nuisances far from unique to the Beeb. The NHS has suffered a series of even more costly debacles. Not for the first time recently, however, the structures of the broadcaster's management and governance have looked dicey. One problem appears to be that neither existing bosses nor the BBC Trust seem to have possessed the knowledge or initiative to act earlier, despite several whistle-blower warnings and admissions that senior managers had felt worried about the undertaking.

Fortunately for Lord (Tony) Hall, the new director general and his team, their role has been to pull the plug quickly, declare that mistakes have been made (echoes of the Soviet communist party dealing with the legacies of recently departed leaders spring to your blogger's mind). Neither Lord Hall nor James Purnell, his strategy chief overseeing the bid for the BBC's charter renewal in 2017, were around at the time. They argue that many other technological innovations, such as the multi-platform viewing of the Olympics and the iPlayer, the BBC's on-demand service, have gone pretty well. Lessons will no doubt be said to have been learnt.

However the BBC Trust, chaired by the avuncular Lord Patten, still has a serious case to answer. Recast in 2007 to give it greater autonomy, the organisation which represents the interest of licence-fee payers has looked slow-footed. The Trust is mainly constituted around the idea of regional representation, and the lack of oversight will surely raise questions about whether it can garner enough expertise in this form to prevent the same sort of problem recurring. Were it to be the non-exec board of a private company, the answer would certainly be that it has so far failed to do that. Largely symbolic oversight is very different from having rigorous, questioning people to ask precisely what is going on when grand undertakings go wrong and excuses run out.

That challenge is on the mind of ministers, toying with the notion of handing over BBC governance to Ofcom, the main media regulator. It will also be on the minds of politicians, as the BBC begins its bid for renewed funding in the new licence-fee settlement from 2017. The path looks rockier than it did.