(2021-04-27) Hon S09e21 Seeing Past The Horizon

Dan Hon: s09e21: Seeing Past The Horizon. Horizon, the UK Post Office’s IT modernization effort

I’m going to learn and write about five things for this piece:

• How technology projects are procured
• How management uses technology
• What happened next…
• … and what we can learn
• The Biggest Lesson

1. How Technology Projects Are Procured

starting 1995

It’s important to note the priorities of the project

say that the above is a magical goddamn laundry list

Any one of these projects is complicated. Oh, and do it all by 1999, 3 years after the contract was awarded.

at the time, there were 19,000 post offices, and see if you can guess how long the 1996-era contract assumed it would take to roll out a live trial of the full system to all 19,000 post offices? Go on. See if you can guess.... Ten months. TEN MONTHS!

Doing the impossible is, well, it’s in the name: impossible. There’s a notice of breach of contract served by the customer, the vendor counter-sues, and then you’ll be shocked to learn that the project was going to have to “increase prices by 30 percent” or “extend the contract by five years and raise prices by five per cent”.

2. How Management Uses Technology

Here’s what happened after Horizon, the name of the IT system developed by ICL/Fujitsu, started to be used.

if Horizon says the balance and accounts of the post office branch you run are off, well… they’re off.

Unsurprising surprise: Horizon has bugs in it that result in discrepancies like this.

Unsurprising surprise 3: management act as if these discrepancies are clearly somebody else’s fault.

That’s when this got worse. The Post Office prosecuted (criminal charges) these subpostmasters who didn’t make good large discrepancies

These prosecutions and convictions started in 2003.

3. What happened next…

On Friday 23 April 2021, the UK Court of Appeal cleared the convictions of 39 post office workers [Post Office Trial, The Guardian]. That’s 45 convictions, to date, that have been cleared.

failure to disclose problems with Horizon and the failure to investigate reported problems — when involved in prosecutions — were “so egregious as to make the prosecution of Horizon cases an affront to the conscience of the court”.

4. …and what can we learn

total lack of interest in investigating these serious issues, bordering on fearfulness of what might be found if they were properly investigated”

“heavily-redacted “Extract from Lessons Learned Log” of November 2015, in which a Post Office official acknowledged there had been “a failure to be open and honest when issues arise eg roll out of Horizon””.

5. The Biggest Lesson

My heart goes out to Jayne Caveen. And I hate to do this: a computer system did not kill her brother. Horrible people in management killed her brother

References / further reading