At the heart of DMI’s approach was the strategy to link new
digital production tools with a central, digital archive that would allow BBC staff and partners to develop, create, share and
manage content digitally, from a desktop. DMI’s digital archive system
would help production teams find content from the BBC’s vast archive.  In addition, new digital production and
desktop tools would help ensure future content and data could be captured,
edited and made available at each step of the production process. (This, incidentally,
is not to be confused with digitising the existing tape archive, which is a
huge undertaking and not part of DMI.)

via www.bbc.co.uk

What the BBC was trying to do was/is a huge undertaking. Most brands that want to work like publishers will need to do this, and from my own experience, it's incredibly complex.