News travels fast on the web but the news that it’s taken the BBC 5 years to work out that a lot of the technology they’d blown £100m on is available today for free, clearly travelled slowly.

If a technology program takes five years to deliver, you can be pretty sure it delivers out of date technology. So says Mr Common Sense, who does not reside in Salford Quays, White City of upper Regent Street but is sitting at home playing with technology that cost him a few quid.

I am blowing a few quid right now on www.pensionplaypen.com which we conceived in January, delivered in April and will baptise next week when we move from beta to alpha.

It has the unusual property among technology projects of delivering to expectations and on time and it will over the next four months continue to do so. This is because the technology is the mechanism and not the message.

The way forward for #pensions is via the screen of the iPhone,iPad and for the true laggard – the laptop. Technology delivers the messages which shape our experience of the world. We capture the digital image of a tree and look at it on a screen. We do not look at trees. Try watching a pop concert, you end up watching the LCDs that flank the stage or the LCDs of da yout in da moshpit.

The lens with which we view reality is digital and digital technology shapes our view of our futures as much as our view of the present.

Information in digital technology land is free, you do not need an instruction manual to work your iPhone, it carries a digital training course – it is the first application you use. If you don’t understand, try Youtube, someone will have posted a video to help.

In this instant world of free information how sexy is this?

You can use composite communications for groups of employees but as a minimum separate notices are needed for:

• Existing active members of a qualifying pension scheme. 

• Eligible jobholders

• Non-eligible jobholders

• Entitled workers 

• Postponement notice(s) 

• Opt-out notices 

• Opt-in notices for non-eligible jobholders 

• Joining notices for entitled workers 

That sits on the website of one of our leading pension institutions!

Fancy issuing an “opt-in notice for a non-eligible jobholder?” well you want to hear the good news? “you can use composite communications for some groups of employees even if your non-eligibles are subject to “separate notices” “- hallejlulah!

This is mad! People want to know about popcorn and large jubblies and “why it’s minus nine degrees and nearly June” and they want someone to talk to. They do not want a separate bleeding notice because they are an entitled worker”.

If it’s worth delivering. let’s have it now! Let’s get on with getting good quality savings plans into the shopping baskets of the 1.2m employers who need them without all the clutter and bother that goes with financial services.

Just give the public something to save with, make it easy and guess what – they’ll have it now.

Related articles

• BBC abandons £100m digital project (bbc.co.uk)
• BBC axes £98m technology project to avoid ‘throwing good money after bad’ (guardian.co.uk)
• The BBC announces the closure of the Digital Media Initiative – DMI (bbc.co.uk)
• Quantum dot displays make your TV brighter than ever (newscientist.com)
• Myths, Marketing, and Misdirection: HDTV edition (reviews.cnet.com)
• BBC director general’s email on the Digital Media Initiative: full text (guardian.co.uk)
• BBC suspends technology boss ‘wasted’ £100m (telegraph.co.uk)