£42.5m What's that in easy to understand units?
About 10½ Vennells?
The UK Post Office has awarded Fujitsu a £42.5m contract extension to run the Horizon IT system, faults in which led to dozens of subpostmasters being wrongly prosecuted. In December last year, the Court of Appeal formally cleared six subpostmasters of criminal convictions including false representation, false accounting, …
'Look Sucker. You know the system is faulty, I know the system is faulty, your customers know the system is faulty. Even the Goddam government knows the system is faulty. But what's the alternative huh? You just gonna keep paper records of all those postage stamps you sell? Ha! Like that's gonna work!'
Chris G : "When you think there has been the best part of two decades to make the system more flexible and less monolithic, one can only think the management don't give a crap."
Well, be fair, they've doubtless been 'advised' about upgrades by Fujitsu, who probably put their 'very best people' on the job*.
*The job being to retain the business despite their obvious failings.
For "economic and technical reasons," the service could not be provided by any organisation other than the original contractor before the expiry of the Horizon Agreement
Okay, sure, that part I can accept. It would be highly unreasonable to throw everything away and have operation grind to a halt while you commission Crapita (because who else ?) to develop an entirely new set of bugs.
So fine, ensure the maintenance of your buggy, mololithic, outdated system. Got it.
Meanwhile, now that you have ensured its continuance, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO REPLACE IT ? Now's the time. Throw another £100 million to somebody and get your non-monolithic, up-to-date, designed for multi-channel digital operations (do you really even know what that means ?), highly Agile system on its feet so that you can replace the dinosaur when the next end date expires.
Because 2024 is going to be here before you finish drawing up your next set of outdated specifications, I'll wager.
Multi-channel:
They have a retail channel, their post offices
They have account customers where they visit every day and collect a vanload of stuff
They also sell stamps to supermarkets etc who then resell them to their own customers
They have online customers who pay for barcodes to print on their envelopes / packages, or pay for stamps and have them delivered
That's four or five different channels.
Former Post Office director Angela van den Bogerd (the one who "misled" the court) was appointed as "Head of People " by the Football Association of Wales(FAW) last year. Since then the Chief Executive, Jonathan Ford, who appointed her has lost a no-confidence motion, been placed on gardening leave, and left the organisation. Van den Bogerd has not had her probationary period extended. See:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/56444886
Ford had been in-post for 11 years.
Your comment reminds me of an exchange in the House of commons between Dennis Skinner (aka the Beast of Bolsover) and the Speaker.
DS: Half the Tory members opposite are crooks.
Speaker: The hon Member will retract that comment.
DS: OK, half the Tory members aren't crooks.
Gosh, you seem to be correct. Hansard does not record Mr Skinner using the work "crooks" at all, and he only uses the word "half" on a few occasions.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?memberId=325&startDate=2016-04-07&endDate=2021-04-07&type=Spoken&searchTerm=half&outputType=List&partial=False
However, it is attributed to him in several other places:
https://www.theweek.co.uk/62692/dennis-skinner-quotes-the-beast-of-bolsover-in-full-flow
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/dodgy-dave-dennis-skinner-kicked-house-commons-pm-jibe-976
https://www.chad.co.uk/news/dennis-skinner-beast-bolsover-five-his-best-quotes-2256248
I am saddened by this scourge of misinformation.
>Hansard does not record Mr Skinner using the work "crooks" at all,
At the option of the house, Hansard does not record things that 'never happened' (were withdrawn with exceptional circumstances). So there is a small open possibility.
More commonly, heckling is not reported unless the the member with the floor responds. So Mr Skinner may have used the word 'crooks' many times, and simply not been reported.
According to the Private Eye,
POST WASTE
Trashing its own reputation and mistreating sub-postmasters in the long running Horizon IT scandal has so far cost the Post Office a quarter of a billion pounds.
... it looks like it will cost more to cover up and then pay the lawyers (oh, and a small amount to the many victims whose lives have been ruined) than it would have cost to write a new system.
Our local sub post office was involved in a fire. The newsagent is back up and running sans the PO business.
Meanwhile a newsagent approx 400m East is now a sub post office as is the one 800m (by road) away to the NW.
So two established local newsagents have apparently jumped at the chance. The guy in the Eastern one is great. Very friendly and efficient. I seriously hope that Horizon doesn’t get him.
I do science tutoring for an online co. They were in dispute with my client over what tutorials I did or did not do in December (when I probably wasn’t tutoring since I had viral meningitis). The co contacted me to resolve the issue. I relied on their systems to keep track . . . Meanwhile the meningitis screws with your memory . . .
There’s a lesson there, keep your own records. I shall be doing that in the future.
As a lawyer who negotiates these types of contracts, the question is whether this £42m one year extension was planned and priced at the outset or not.
Everyone can anticipate that making major infrastructure change rarely runs to schedule, and ability to seek short term extensions to long running contracts will probably be useful. Ideally they will be priced fairly, based on existing rate cards / contractual spend. Suppliers who know they are losing the contract are rarely keen to keep supporting that contract for short extensions and so will price it prohibitively, or even refuse outright, unless it is part of their agreement at the outset.
Nevertheless, so many of my clients are drinking the Kool Aid, and really only care about getting the contract signed as quickly as possible. They prefer to avoid long negotiations on what they see as remote risks. We always warn them but query whether these warnings get passed onto their boards.
Caveat emptor.
It's our industry's equivalent of technical debt.
When BT lost the CHIEF* contract renewal to CapGemini, HMRC was 'disappointed' that we did not bid for the much smaller contract of supporting an associated system. The BT managers having decided that it was not worth the contract value to keep the staff necessary engaged in the work.
*Cargo Handling Import Export Freight
Once upon a time there was a software design principle: Do one thing and do it well.
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Twice upon a time there was a software architecture principle: Modularity
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Then people (like SAP) came along and provided EVERYTHING (....well....most of everything) in one huge shiny box. This new approach had the fantastic benefit (for SAP and others) that it meant lots of extra business for consultants and programmers to "configure" the huge shiny box.
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And here we are today.....another huge shiny box.......more consultants.......more "configure" possibilities........no end in sight.......
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Did I mention design or modularity? Sorry....just so early twentieth century!
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Perhaps we can start on the next disaster.....the one that involves "agile", "devops" and "cloud"?......the one that will see an action replay in ANOTHER twenty years!!!!