How The Mighty Are Fallen?

-

More watching the Post Office Scandal Enquiry today, with the testimony - and I use that word advisedly - of two former Chief Execs of Fujitsu: Richard Christou, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Fujitsu Services Holdings plc; and Duncan Tait, former CEO of Fujitsu Services Ltd. The former seemed simply peeved to be there answering questions at all, interjecting the interrogative 'Yes?' as if to suggest that he was simply above the whole affair and really should be playing golf in the Algarve, rather than answering questions put to him about his part in what, after all, is a matter of some public gravity, to say the least.

His assertion that the product provided to Post Office Ltd., which was designed and supplied by the company he headed, did not [I paraphrase wickedly, but the crux and substance of the issue remain] actually need to function correctly, so long as the word of the contractual relationship with the client was kept [he even tried the 'Angels dancing on the head of a pin' ruse to argue the semantics of, and suggest that the term 'robust' had no legal definition], frankly left me speechless, which is a very rare turn of events in this household.

The next 'turn' on stage seemed to have the worst case of corporate amnesia imaginable for the 'boss' of an IT company - and, it has to be said, he had an actual IT background, early on his career - claiming that he had not engaged with any of the Computer Weekly articles concerning the affair, which had been a regular feature in the paper since they first exposed the scandal in 2009. Computer Weekly has been the trade journal for a very long time: to suggest that someone in such a senior rôle in such a large IT company would not partake of it regularly alongside his daily Financial Times is frankly nonsense. He also claimed to not have watched any TV documentary coverage of the affair at the time; a bonkers assertion, and transparently false.

Whether any of this heralds the imminent demise of the current incarnation of the deeply-government-embedded ICL, now Fujitsu, must still be considered moot, as despite the European head of the company stating that it had written to the Cabinet Office in January of this year, saying that, in light of the public enquiry/outrage, it would not bid for any new contracts or renewals with the government, unless the government requested it to do so; it still expects - projects - to haul in a further £1.3bn of contracts from them over the next twelve-month, comprised of approx £800m of public sector work and £500m of UK national security contracts [source: Computer Weekly]. Someone, somewhere, still has their finger up someone's arse over this, so we remain to be convinced that things will change, whatever the outcome of the Public Enquiry and whatever criminal trials ensue from its findings. We'll see...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des
Read more

Sister Ray

-
Image
Ray Keats - aka Ann Key - local artist & family friend, died this morning. She'd been ill for some years, but never let it get in the way of her work or of tending to the massive network of friends, colleagues and fans she had accumulated over the decades. Her house on the High Street of Rachub, just below where we live - a former cockle factory(!) - bought many years ago when she and her late husband Ronald moved here from Manchester to set up home in Yr Achub, is currently still home to her paintings and drawings, and the front window displays her work, including the last drawing she made in hospital, just days before she died. Her good friend Colin has been a diamond in her latter years, looking out for her and just being there when she needed him. She will be much missed by this tiny community of ageing bohemians up here in the hills, but suffice it to say, George, her cat, will be well looked after now she's gone.
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [
Read more