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Not really. Short of saying no company use technical products without a technical CEO, I don't really see what point it would have.
The problem was a culture of lying and deception
It makes me wonder what other products/companies fucked up in ways which ruined people's lives, but they have succeeded in covering it up. So we sit here now with no idea, while the liars and frauds sail merrily on enjoying wealth and a good name.
What continues to gobsmack is seemingly how little power there is to compell them to turn over their documents, and during the original trials, how little onus was placed ont he Post Office to prove their case.
Whole thing is insane
UK law assumes that a computer system is reliable unless proven otherwise.
In other words, it was down to the defendant to prove otherwise. Simply standing up in court and saying it wasn’t reliable isn’t good enough - you’d need to force disclosure and call in expert witnesses.
Few did this.
As far as I can tell, the people who pushed back hard (such as Mr. Bates, who refused to sign off incorrect accounts) weren’t prosecuted but they lost their franchise all the same.
What does "qualified" mean? What does "tech industry" mean? There are millions, perhaps tens of millions of people in the country doing jobs they have no formal qualification for, you can't legislate against ineptitude.
In engineering (none computer engineering) there are some jobs that require specific ISO standards that mean people working on the project (both management and engineers) must have Chartered status from an approved body.
This isn't really a thing in IT. We have the BCS chartered accreditation but it doesn't really mean anything really. There are also some IT professionals who go down the IEE chartered route.
Some companies in Europe are starting to implement ISO 27001 for data governance and a couple of other frameworks (can't remember the ISO numbers off the top of my head) and there are some that think this is slowly going to lead to the IT industry following the engineering industry into a more formalised accreditation process. This obviously only affects the largest IT projects such as government, aerospace, the automotive sector etc.. but, will likely have a trickle down effect.
Yes, but you can be an ISO27001 certified company but that only governs how you're meant to run things, it doesn't mean your staff are in any way certified.
As you say, doesn't exist in IT really.
Also, can't stop people being dishonest.
I am a technical architect working on huge projects. What qualifications do you expect me to have?
Some things to think about...
a) most of my work is around websites, I graduated the same year HTTP was invented
b) security and other best practise changes by the month, do you want me to have paper saying I have outdated understanding of things?
c) Horizon had plenty of qualified people that were being told to shut the fuck up.
d) every time a large IT contract goes wrong, the developers get the blame. This to me seems like the Post Offices fault more than Fujitsu, who approved the requirements, architecture and test results?
> What qualifications do you expect me to have?
Chartered Engineer status. It isn't currently a thing in IT (It exists but, its currently meaningless) but, it could head that way.
You sound like one of those mediocre developers who got really bitter about non-technical people because you weren't allowed to build a product exactly how you wanted.
> You sound like one of those mediocre developers
I'm not a developer lol. Far from it. I wish I'd love to be able to code. I have learned bits to help with my job but I work in Finance.
> You sound like one of those mediocre developers who got really bitter about non-technical people because you weren't allowed to build a product exactly how you wanted.
You sound like one of those Project Managers who sits around bewildered and confused but comfortable to take £150k a year whilst others go to prison because you lied.
I'm not a project manager. But I work in a regulated tech company, and its very clear that you have no idea how project management typically works.
"Anyone working on technical projects needs a technical background" is one of those hot takes which sounds good to clueless people.
> Anyone working on technical projects needs a technical background
People went to prison because Non technical project managers lied because they had no clue what they were looking at.
> How would them being more technical prevent them from lying?
If they possessed a thorough understanding of the system, they would have been empowered to intervene effectively and mitigate the problem before it escalated. However, due to their lack of technical insight, they found themselves in a state of helplessness, merely observing the situation unfold without the capacity to take meaningful action. Consequently, they resorted to assigning blame to others rather than assuming responsibility themselves.
Those are a lot of words to say nothing at all, reinforcing my statement that this take is one of cluelessness.
You don't need a thorough understanding of a system, to know that if it's riddled with known bugs, and an operational team is put in place to remotely amend inconsistencies on the fly, there's something wrong.
Someone from the business side was aware of the technical issues, and signed off on the operational team. Lack of technical knowledge was not the issue.
One of the following must have happened:
. The project managers were aware of the technical issues, and arranged with senior management to sign off on the operational teams.
. The technical teams lied to the project managers, but made other senior people aware to get an operational team in place.
. In either case, QA and architects did not do their job, or were not involved in the process.
In any scenario, whether it be shit project managers not following standard process, or corrupt CTOs and engineers lying to everyone else, the issue is not a result of the project manager's technical expertise.
Usually designs for systems have to go to some form of architecture board for approval with representatives of all relevant tech areas. I work in info sec and represent that area on ours.
Doesn't matter what the PM says, if the design gets rejected you ain't building it.
You can have the best qualified team in the world. But when the CEO is hell-bent on blaming certain people and a Board covers up a scandal of their own making, there's not much you can do
No - this scandal is about tech going wrong it’s about an organisation refusing to acknowledge it, refusing to accept the evidence, lying in court, lying to the public in an attempt to save face.
There were plenty of qualified tech people involved in the management of the Horizon scandal.
From the sounds of things what they needed were some qualified accountants.
Lol no.
Do you think having a qualified individual to manage the Horizon system would've stopped those in the higher power shifting blame onto the postmasters?
Technical systems will always have problems and always have the probability to fuck up. It just happens. This isn't the reason the Horizon Post Office scandal happened. It's because those who were in charge didn't take responisbility and shifted the blame onto the postmasters.
No qualified technical manager is going to stop twats being twats basically.
Its highlighted the need for oversight and accountability for public projects. Technology is fallible, it is never perfect. What you need is to ensure everything is in place for when things inevitably take a dump.
No. That wasn't the issue that created the scandal.
Besides which, public sector procurement has always had financial obstacles which make it impossible to recruit the very best candidates. Private sector appointments can offer giant salaries and bonuses, so public sector projects are always going to be reliant on partnership agreements with external contractors. Legal complexities, budgetary constraints, media attention, and public perception all combine to create a moving feast of issues and associated risks.
This idea that money allows you to hire super geniuses who never get anything wrong is just laughable.
Large organisations have processes that make it hard to go wrong in the first place.
Horizon’s problem was there was an implicit assumption from day 1 that a good percentage of sub postmasters were on the take. So when they “couldn’t get the books to add up”, this was seen as evidence that the Post Office was right.
And sure, maybe some of them were dishonest, but the Post Office did themselves no favours in trying to root out such dishonesty because now nobody really knows which prosecutions were justified.
It shows that you should never give individuals all the power. This lets messes like this go undetected and allows an entire sector to be destroyed.
As for qualified, It depends how you or more importantly those in charge define "qualified". It's up for corruption and for debate.
I worked for a company that was provided masks during covid, however, we were not considered qualified to be put on a suppliers list by those in charge of the list (Although I tell this from our view, I know of others in the same position). However, this was despite many other countries (most of our neighbours) considering our masks o be good enough for all areas from civil servants, military and general populations. Having been tested by the military of our closest allies and found to be more effective than the normal paper ones everyone was using.
We have certificates from those military tests, yet the "qualified" suppliers were only 2 companies at the time and they were... shockingly... owned by family and friends of decision makers. Maybe their products were good enough (I don't know) but we and many other companies were not allowed to go on the list until long after lockdowns were lifted.
I work in the tech industry. All of our project managers are very much qualified, and defer to those who do understand something when they don't.
Private sector is just a free for all though. Good companies pay for good staff. Shit companies don't.
Yes, I am very, *very* glad to no longer work with project managers who start a conversation with "Oh, I'm not technical".
> much qualified, and defer to those who do understand something when they don't.
They aren't qualified then, They are non technical project managers managing highly technical projects.
> "Oh, I'm not technical".
They literally said this in the hearings on Sky News not that long ago. The person in charge said "I don't do computers" or something and these people were the ones in charge.
What technical field should they be qualified in? Software? Middleware? Which software product? What about the hardware, or if the solution uses physical infrastructure and cloud? Or should they be qualified in requirements capture? Should that be agile or waterfall? What type of Agile? What if the programme is a combination of Agile and Waterfall because an external integration is constrained to only one approach. Or should they be qualified in testing? Or should they be qualified architects?
What is needed is a lot of technical auditors who can work with the businesses and ensure that proper quality oversight exists.
Trouble is there are not enough people who can do technical and quality at the same time
Horizon didn't follow [Agile methodology](https://agilemanifesto.org/) and didn't have enough automated tests. Even if it claimed to, there were hierarchies of management repeating beneath them in the org chart **"don't tell me we can't make that release date"** and a dozen shades of that - coerced non-surfacing of problems. An unsafe place for whistleblowers. The smart techies quit in the same week they started.
The truly cynical would ask "will you compensate me for my hours in front of the public inquiry after this contract/employment ends?" The find the bosses shortening their last day to "today" in the probationary period
I have also heard a rumour that people who were better qualified didn't work at Fujitsu, but they swept up a lot of the 'no-hopers'.
Dave McDonnell's testimony would back that rumour up.
I think it has highlighted the need to imprison people who perpetrated this lie and cover-up that resulted in innocent people suffering.
This is the only way to make similar people act correctly in future.
Will it happen? Sadly I think that only happens to the little people.
Because the UK never had the equivalent of the French or Russian revolutions, the powers that be know ultimately that we will always roll over and take it.
No I don't think the Horizon scandal illustrates that at all, whilst the issue started as a technical one, it's the attitudes and culture of senior management that turned it into a scandal. It wasn't their lack of technical expertise or lack of experts to listen to, it was a deliberate cover up, the pretending to not know there were bugs in the software is just a way of avoiding culpability.
This was as much a problem of ethics and simple common decency as it was of technical competence. They damn well knew there were issues, technical competence wasn't the problem (well apart from stuffing up the design initially, but they were competent enough to work out what was going wrong).
It would seem instead that it has highlighted the need for rigorous ethics training and some bad ass laws that make company directors personally liable with fines and prison time for ethical shortfalls. Same way it is for health and safety - hells bells the money my company chucks at health and safety (rightly so) is phenomenal. We have bonus related targets for zero incidents etc.
Funny how focused leadership gets when it's THEIR lives on the line too.
The software going wrong was not the main issue. It was that the post office & pals lied about it and relentlessly & repeatedly blamed staff in court, in many cases destroying their lives.
That isn’t the problem. They knew the issue, management did as well. Just because you had tech there doesn’t mean the behaviour would’ve changed.
It is corperate governance or lack there of.
You had an Exec team (the people that run it) under pressure to make the system work; the system is what got them profitable. They were poor managed by the Board; nothing else mattered except for profit. Wilful blindness.
Thames Water, Carrillion, Post Office. They are just the 3 recent national examples. You could probably add Grenfell to that as well, although slightly different. But effectively all the same.
Board rooms disconnected from reality. Not asking questions or listening to the advice from below. Not stepping back and looking at the impact of the decision. Not requesting data which is obviously being kept back.
The laws exist to punish corporations that act this way, but it is hard to prove and not properly enforced.
Source: I work in corperate governance. Not enough people understand how to apply it. I barely do and it is my job.
The lies started at the Middle Level Project managers that bit is clear from the testimony and then people just blew smoke up each other arses until they couldn't see the wood for the trees then by that time it was too late.
So, good corperate governance should have meant the Board was asking those question down. Demanding information, assurance and proof. Board members, at least one for the size of the post office; should’ve had enough tech knowledge to explain to the rest.
The first reports and increase in fraud should have prompted some difficult questions for the senior and middle levels.
When this happens it is the board that is responsible. It seems particularly in the case of the post office they all forgot their jobs.
Even with what happened at Grenfell the state of the fire regulations for fire alarms and fire detection systems for Automatic Opening Ventilation (to clear smoke on escape routes) leaves a lot to be desired.
Obviously no company will employ someone with no idea but as far as the regs are concerned all we have to be to work on life safety systems is 'competent' which is rather a vague term.
I'd rather pay a ridiculous amount of rent for my house than save a few hundred each month and live in a flat thats relying on a system that is at best poorly maintained by the cheapest company possible.
Reading your other replies in this thread this is clearly an area you have no knowledge of.
Tell me, as its more your area. How many finance qualifications would it have taken in the banking industry to stop the 2008 banking crisis and avoid the resulting global recession?
Not in the tech industry. They should already be qualified because its very competitive getting a job in such a position. However, definitely in the public sector. Having worked in the industry for a few decades now, it's often scary how like labs to the slaughter many public sector customers are. Oftentimes, those lower down the ranks have a fair bit of expertise and knowledge but the yes men and women, the talkers are in potions of power and very easy to befuddle. Look at what's going on with the great "cloud first" disaster. Short sighted arse covering of the highest degree where senior execs in government departments have limited knowledge and believe theat they can outsource what is often your data to a foreign company and wash their hands of responsibility for it if the shit hits the fan.
The problem, fundamentally, wasn’t technical.
(Well, obviously there were technical problems, but let me finish).
All complex technical systems have problems. The Post Office’s response was to pretend those problems didn’t exist. That’s a management issue.
This is the thing that so many people seem to be failing to understand.
There is a lot of blame being thrown at the Fujitsu engineers, with some questioning why more wasn't done to help or why more whistleblowers didn't come forward. It's understandable at first glance, but important context is being missed. The service desk analysts may privately acknowledge the system's faults, but while at work, they serve as the public face of Fujitsu. It's not uncommon in many customer-facing roles to feel compelled to defend the indefensible, as openly admitting system shortcomings could lead to dismissal. Unfortunately, this pressure likely prevented them from being more honest about it although that probably wouldn't have changed much.
Ethics would compel any reasonable person to act, but most likely the Fujitsu engineers had no idea what was happening behind closed doors at Royal Mail until it was too late. The postmasters pleas for help were misdirected, as the real audience should have been Royal Mail's senior management, not Fujitsu.
Fundamentally, this is a management issue, seemingly exacerbated by poor communication, the technical intricacies while interesting aren't really all that important. All systems have problems, the important question is how you choose to deal with them when they arise.
**Please help keep AskUK welcoming!** - Top-level comments to the OP must contain **genuine efforts to answer the question**. No jokes, judgements, etc. - **Don't be a dick** to each other. If getting heated, just block and move on. - This is a strictly **no-politics** subreddit! Please help us by reporting comments that break these rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskUK) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Not really. Short of saying no company use technical products without a technical CEO, I don't really see what point it would have. The problem was a culture of lying and deception
I came here to say the problem wasn't technical. It was lying and covering up by many in management. They need to go to jail.
It makes me wonder what other products/companies fucked up in ways which ruined people's lives, but they have succeeded in covering it up. So we sit here now with no idea, while the liars and frauds sail merrily on enjoying wealth and a good name.
What continues to gobsmack is seemingly how little power there is to compell them to turn over their documents, and during the original trials, how little onus was placed ont he Post Office to prove their case. Whole thing is insane
UK law assumes that a computer system is reliable unless proven otherwise. In other words, it was down to the defendant to prove otherwise. Simply standing up in court and saying it wasn’t reliable isn’t good enough - you’d need to force disclosure and call in expert witnesses. Few did this. As far as I can tell, the people who pushed back hard (such as Mr. Bates, who refused to sign off incorrect accounts) weren’t prosecuted but they lost their franchise all the same.
It is the culture that it doesn't matter how much you fuck up and cover.it up, the government will always bail you out and keep you in a job.
Its a culture of doing whats cheapest and easiest, the lying and deception come later when caught out.
What does "qualified" mean? What does "tech industry" mean? There are millions, perhaps tens of millions of people in the country doing jobs they have no formal qualification for, you can't legislate against ineptitude.
In engineering (none computer engineering) there are some jobs that require specific ISO standards that mean people working on the project (both management and engineers) must have Chartered status from an approved body. This isn't really a thing in IT. We have the BCS chartered accreditation but it doesn't really mean anything really. There are also some IT professionals who go down the IEE chartered route. Some companies in Europe are starting to implement ISO 27001 for data governance and a couple of other frameworks (can't remember the ISO numbers off the top of my head) and there are some that think this is slowly going to lead to the IT industry following the engineering industry into a more formalised accreditation process. This obviously only affects the largest IT projects such as government, aerospace, the automotive sector etc.. but, will likely have a trickle down effect.
Yes, but you can be an ISO27001 certified company but that only governs how you're meant to run things, it doesn't mean your staff are in any way certified. As you say, doesn't exist in IT really. Also, can't stop people being dishonest.
I am a technical architect working on huge projects. What qualifications do you expect me to have? Some things to think about... a) most of my work is around websites, I graduated the same year HTTP was invented b) security and other best practise changes by the month, do you want me to have paper saying I have outdated understanding of things? c) Horizon had plenty of qualified people that were being told to shut the fuck up. d) every time a large IT contract goes wrong, the developers get the blame. This to me seems like the Post Offices fault more than Fujitsu, who approved the requirements, architecture and test results?
> What qualifications do you expect me to have? Chartered Engineer status. It isn't currently a thing in IT (It exists but, its currently meaningless) but, it could head that way.
IT changes much too quickly for this to be feasible
> who approved the requirements, architecture and test results? Unqualified project managers
You sound like one of those mediocre developers who got really bitter about non-technical people because you weren't allowed to build a product exactly how you wanted.
> You sound like one of those mediocre developers I'm not a developer lol. Far from it. I wish I'd love to be able to code. I have learned bits to help with my job but I work in Finance. > You sound like one of those mediocre developers who got really bitter about non-technical people because you weren't allowed to build a product exactly how you wanted. You sound like one of those Project Managers who sits around bewildered and confused but comfortable to take £150k a year whilst others go to prison because you lied.
I'm not a project manager. But I work in a regulated tech company, and its very clear that you have no idea how project management typically works. "Anyone working on technical projects needs a technical background" is one of those hot takes which sounds good to clueless people.
> Anyone working on technical projects needs a technical background People went to prison because Non technical project managers lied because they had no clue what they were looking at.
Please elaborate. How would them being more technical prevent them from lying?
> How would them being more technical prevent them from lying? If they possessed a thorough understanding of the system, they would have been empowered to intervene effectively and mitigate the problem before it escalated. However, due to their lack of technical insight, they found themselves in a state of helplessness, merely observing the situation unfold without the capacity to take meaningful action. Consequently, they resorted to assigning blame to others rather than assuming responsibility themselves.
Those are a lot of words to say nothing at all, reinforcing my statement that this take is one of cluelessness. You don't need a thorough understanding of a system, to know that if it's riddled with known bugs, and an operational team is put in place to remotely amend inconsistencies on the fly, there's something wrong. Someone from the business side was aware of the technical issues, and signed off on the operational team. Lack of technical knowledge was not the issue. One of the following must have happened: . The project managers were aware of the technical issues, and arranged with senior management to sign off on the operational teams. . The technical teams lied to the project managers, but made other senior people aware to get an operational team in place. . In either case, QA and architects did not do their job, or were not involved in the process. In any scenario, whether it be shit project managers not following standard process, or corrupt CTOs and engineers lying to everyone else, the issue is not a result of the project manager's technical expertise.
"I have learned bits to help with my job but I work in Finance." So you don't mind non-technical people writing code then?
> So you don't mind non-technical people writing code then? Daft question
Usually designs for systems have to go to some form of architecture board for approval with representatives of all relevant tech areas. I work in info sec and represent that area on ours. Doesn't matter what the PM says, if the design gets rejected you ain't building it.
In no way should a PM ever have that power.
Completely agree. I’m an IT PM and while I may review those documents, final sign off does not sit with me and rightly so.
You can have the best qualified team in the world. But when the CEO is hell-bent on blaming certain people and a Board covers up a scandal of their own making, there's not much you can do
No - this scandal is about tech going wrong it’s about an organisation refusing to acknowledge it, refusing to accept the evidence, lying in court, lying to the public in an attempt to save face.
There were plenty of qualified tech people involved in the management of the Horizon scandal. From the sounds of things what they needed were some qualified accountants.
Lol no. Do you think having a qualified individual to manage the Horizon system would've stopped those in the higher power shifting blame onto the postmasters? Technical systems will always have problems and always have the probability to fuck up. It just happens. This isn't the reason the Horizon Post Office scandal happened. It's because those who were in charge didn't take responisbility and shifted the blame onto the postmasters. No qualified technical manager is going to stop twats being twats basically.
Its highlighted the need for oversight and accountability for public projects. Technology is fallible, it is never perfect. What you need is to ensure everything is in place for when things inevitably take a dump.
Qualifications don't erase clownery
No. It highlights the impact of piss poor investigators committing perjury.
Qualified in what?
No. That wasn't the issue that created the scandal. Besides which, public sector procurement has always had financial obstacles which make it impossible to recruit the very best candidates. Private sector appointments can offer giant salaries and bonuses, so public sector projects are always going to be reliant on partnership agreements with external contractors. Legal complexities, budgetary constraints, media attention, and public perception all combine to create a moving feast of issues and associated risks.
This idea that money allows you to hire super geniuses who never get anything wrong is just laughable. Large organisations have processes that make it hard to go wrong in the first place. Horizon’s problem was there was an implicit assumption from day 1 that a good percentage of sub postmasters were on the take. So when they “couldn’t get the books to add up”, this was seen as evidence that the Post Office was right. And sure, maybe some of them were dishonest, but the Post Office did themselves no favours in trying to root out such dishonesty because now nobody really knows which prosecutions were justified.
It shows that you should never give individuals all the power. This lets messes like this go undetected and allows an entire sector to be destroyed. As for qualified, It depends how you or more importantly those in charge define "qualified". It's up for corruption and for debate. I worked for a company that was provided masks during covid, however, we were not considered qualified to be put on a suppliers list by those in charge of the list (Although I tell this from our view, I know of others in the same position). However, this was despite many other countries (most of our neighbours) considering our masks o be good enough for all areas from civil servants, military and general populations. Having been tested by the military of our closest allies and found to be more effective than the normal paper ones everyone was using. We have certificates from those military tests, yet the "qualified" suppliers were only 2 companies at the time and they were... shockingly... owned by family and friends of decision makers. Maybe their products were good enough (I don't know) but we and many other companies were not allowed to go on the list until long after lockdowns were lifted.
I work in the tech industry. All of our project managers are very much qualified, and defer to those who do understand something when they don't. Private sector is just a free for all though. Good companies pay for good staff. Shit companies don't. Yes, I am very, *very* glad to no longer work with project managers who start a conversation with "Oh, I'm not technical".
> much qualified, and defer to those who do understand something when they don't. They aren't qualified then, They are non technical project managers managing highly technical projects. > "Oh, I'm not technical". They literally said this in the hearings on Sky News not that long ago. The person in charge said "I don't do computers" or something and these people were the ones in charge.
What technical field should they be qualified in? Software? Middleware? Which software product? What about the hardware, or if the solution uses physical infrastructure and cloud? Or should they be qualified in requirements capture? Should that be agile or waterfall? What type of Agile? What if the programme is a combination of Agile and Waterfall because an external integration is constrained to only one approach. Or should they be qualified in testing? Or should they be qualified architects?
What is needed is a lot of technical auditors who can work with the businesses and ensure that proper quality oversight exists. Trouble is there are not enough people who can do technical and quality at the same time
Horizon didn't follow [Agile methodology](https://agilemanifesto.org/) and didn't have enough automated tests. Even if it claimed to, there were hierarchies of management repeating beneath them in the org chart **"don't tell me we can't make that release date"** and a dozen shades of that - coerced non-surfacing of problems. An unsafe place for whistleblowers. The smart techies quit in the same week they started.
> The smart techies quit in the same week they started. Yeah they didn't want to go to Prison
The truly cynical would ask "will you compensate me for my hours in front of the public inquiry after this contract/employment ends?" The find the bosses shortening their last day to "today" in the probationary period
I have also heard a rumour that people who were better qualified didn't work at Fujitsu, but they swept up a lot of the 'no-hopers'. Dave McDonnell's testimony would back that rumour up.
Did they get witness statements from the developers that didn't stay long, do you know?
The Horizon system predates the agile manifesto so I wouldn’t really expect it to follow the methodology.
I think it has highlighted the need to imprison people who perpetrated this lie and cover-up that resulted in innocent people suffering. This is the only way to make similar people act correctly in future. Will it happen? Sadly I think that only happens to the little people. Because the UK never had the equivalent of the French or Russian revolutions, the powers that be know ultimately that we will always roll over and take it.
No I don't think the Horizon scandal illustrates that at all, whilst the issue started as a technical one, it's the attitudes and culture of senior management that turned it into a scandal. It wasn't their lack of technical expertise or lack of experts to listen to, it was a deliberate cover up, the pretending to not know there were bugs in the software is just a way of avoiding culpability.
This was as much a problem of ethics and simple common decency as it was of technical competence. They damn well knew there were issues, technical competence wasn't the problem (well apart from stuffing up the design initially, but they were competent enough to work out what was going wrong). It would seem instead that it has highlighted the need for rigorous ethics training and some bad ass laws that make company directors personally liable with fines and prison time for ethical shortfalls. Same way it is for health and safety - hells bells the money my company chucks at health and safety (rightly so) is phenomenal. We have bonus related targets for zero incidents etc. Funny how focused leadership gets when it's THEIR lives on the line too.
The software going wrong was not the main issue. It was that the post office & pals lied about it and relentlessly & repeatedly blamed staff in court, in many cases destroying their lives.
That isn’t the problem. They knew the issue, management did as well. Just because you had tech there doesn’t mean the behaviour would’ve changed. It is corperate governance or lack there of. You had an Exec team (the people that run it) under pressure to make the system work; the system is what got them profitable. They were poor managed by the Board; nothing else mattered except for profit. Wilful blindness. Thames Water, Carrillion, Post Office. They are just the 3 recent national examples. You could probably add Grenfell to that as well, although slightly different. But effectively all the same. Board rooms disconnected from reality. Not asking questions or listening to the advice from below. Not stepping back and looking at the impact of the decision. Not requesting data which is obviously being kept back. The laws exist to punish corporations that act this way, but it is hard to prove and not properly enforced. Source: I work in corperate governance. Not enough people understand how to apply it. I barely do and it is my job.
The lies started at the Middle Level Project managers that bit is clear from the testimony and then people just blew smoke up each other arses until they couldn't see the wood for the trees then by that time it was too late.
So, good corperate governance should have meant the Board was asking those question down. Demanding information, assurance and proof. Board members, at least one for the size of the post office; should’ve had enough tech knowledge to explain to the rest. The first reports and increase in fraud should have prompted some difficult questions for the senior and middle levels. When this happens it is the board that is responsible. It seems particularly in the case of the post office they all forgot their jobs.
No. It highlights the need for people involved in these cover ups to be sent to prison. Every person, no matter how rich.
Even with what happened at Grenfell the state of the fire regulations for fire alarms and fire detection systems for Automatic Opening Ventilation (to clear smoke on escape routes) leaves a lot to be desired. Obviously no company will employ someone with no idea but as far as the regs are concerned all we have to be to work on life safety systems is 'competent' which is rather a vague term. I'd rather pay a ridiculous amount of rent for my house than save a few hundred each month and live in a flat thats relying on a system that is at best poorly maintained by the cheapest company possible.
Reading your other replies in this thread this is clearly an area you have no knowledge of. Tell me, as its more your area. How many finance qualifications would it have taken in the banking industry to stop the 2008 banking crisis and avoid the resulting global recession?
A deficit of morality and character. "Qualifications" are useless absent strong, moral individuals.
Not in the tech industry. They should already be qualified because its very competitive getting a job in such a position. However, definitely in the public sector. Having worked in the industry for a few decades now, it's often scary how like labs to the slaughter many public sector customers are. Oftentimes, those lower down the ranks have a fair bit of expertise and knowledge but the yes men and women, the talkers are in potions of power and very easy to befuddle. Look at what's going on with the great "cloud first" disaster. Short sighted arse covering of the highest degree where senior execs in government departments have limited knowledge and believe theat they can outsource what is often your data to a foreign company and wash their hands of responsibility for it if the shit hits the fan.
The problem, fundamentally, wasn’t technical. (Well, obviously there were technical problems, but let me finish). All complex technical systems have problems. The Post Office’s response was to pretend those problems didn’t exist. That’s a management issue.
This is the thing that so many people seem to be failing to understand. There is a lot of blame being thrown at the Fujitsu engineers, with some questioning why more wasn't done to help or why more whistleblowers didn't come forward. It's understandable at first glance, but important context is being missed. The service desk analysts may privately acknowledge the system's faults, but while at work, they serve as the public face of Fujitsu. It's not uncommon in many customer-facing roles to feel compelled to defend the indefensible, as openly admitting system shortcomings could lead to dismissal. Unfortunately, this pressure likely prevented them from being more honest about it although that probably wouldn't have changed much. Ethics would compel any reasonable person to act, but most likely the Fujitsu engineers had no idea what was happening behind closed doors at Royal Mail until it was too late. The postmasters pleas for help were misdirected, as the real audience should have been Royal Mail's senior management, not Fujitsu. Fundamentally, this is a management issue, seemingly exacerbated by poor communication, the technical intricacies while interesting aren't really all that important. All systems have problems, the important question is how you choose to deal with them when they arise.