Garbage In, Garbage Out...

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I've been watching the [UK] Post Office Scandal Enquiry today and listening to the testimony of Lesley Sewell - former CIO at Post Office Limited. I'll just say that she came over as someone completely and utterly traumatised by a seriously negative workplace experience. What she actually said, or simply alluded to, will have far-reaching and hopefully legally dire implications for those at the heart of this corporate travesty.

Two things: Firstly, Horizon was built upon an off-the-shelf system called Riposte. The naive among our number would naturally imagine that a complex, networked accounting system would be based on a robust DBMS [database management system], programmed appropriately for the purposes of account management; the fundamental principles of which were laid down by Italian bankers and merchants centuries ago [the principles of double-entry book-keeping still hold good to this day]. But no, they chose to build this shoddy edifice on the back of an XML-based messaging system, itself in turn built with Visual Basic, hardly the most robust enterprise programming language of choice. The detail of all this is beyond the scope of my nightly scribble, but suffice it to say that professional it weren't, and the consequences dire.

Secondly, I pick up today's paper [i] and read that Fujitsu staff are being moved onto a UK military contract, despite the monumental software fuckups they leave in their wake at Post Office Limited. In a sidebar to the article, the paper reports that "Removing Fujitsu from government systems 'not an overnight job' ", alluding to a 'fifty year' relationship between the government and the company: a fact that is only peripherally true, as it was the government-formed [in the 1960s] ICL that was embedded within our establishment. Fujitsu only became the major stakeholder in that company in the 1980s. But whatever that history, the litany of failure, both in terms of performance and of return on public investment in the years since, beggars belief: and to suggest that unpicking this monstrosity will take some considerable time implies a monks' chain of complicity that will almost certainly make ones eyes water if revealed in full.

I leave you with a snippet of code that was actually deployed live within the Horizon 'system' by Fujitsu, the larger context for which can be downloaded as a .pdf file from the enquiry website:

Public Function ReverseSign(d)
    If d<0 Then
        d=Abs(d)
    Else
        d=d-(d*2)
    EndIf
    ReverseSign=d
End Function

As anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of coding will tell you, this is complete bollocks. Whoever authored this exhibits practically zero knowledge of their 'craft'. And this kind of crap has been at the foundation of so many failed, but oh, so lucrative government procurement orders for so many years, at the cost of hundreds, if not thousands of ordinary people's livelihoods, and a burden on the public purse of tens, if not hundreds of billions of pounds. It really is time to call a halt on this...


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