In the late 1990s, the result of a fight in between 2 factions within the Post Office set off the IT issues that, integrated with business impropriety, resulted in what is today called the Horizon scandal.
If a minute in the Post Office’s automation job can be recognized as the trigger of the huge failures of the previous twenty years, it was the choice to turn down a recognized retail software application bundle in favour of going back to square one, according to previous Post Office executive Rupert Lloyd Thomas.
Thomas invested 27 years at the Post Office, with his last year associated with picking a provider to offer the electronic point-of-sale (Epos) system in the Horizon job.
The agreement to automate countless branches was currently concurred with British tech business ICL– which was later on taken control of by Fujitsu – as the selected provider, however a crucial choice was still to be made about the Epos software application: would the Post Office utilize a recognized attempted and checked bundle currently in the market, or would it construct from scratch?
Make versus purchase fight
There were 2 opposing groups within the Post Office. Lloyd Thomas, together with others, was promoting the adoption of a commercially readily available retail system.
“The primary concern was, were we going to utilize some packaged software application that had been utilized in other places, or were we going to compose one from scratch? I was strongly in the packaged software application camp,” he informed Computer Weekly.
Lloyd Thomas stated the group had an effective performance history in carrying out industrial software application after its choice to relocate to SAP financials succeeded. “I combated the great battle when they wished to change the journals and won by getting SAP carried out. It had a great deal of benefits,” he stated.
Lloyd Thomas stated he desired the very same method for the Epos system. “I beinged in conference after conference, stating, ‘no bespoke, no bespoke, simply leave it alone, due to the fact that as soon as you begin kludging it, you can’t depend on software application upgrades originating from the provider’.”
ICL owned a retail system called GlobalSTORE, which was an alternative being pressed by the group Lloyd Thomas was on. “You wish to depend on software application upgrades from the provider and install them easily. If you kludge the system you will not have the ability to do it,” he stated.
Lloyd Thomas stated the “make versus purchase” argument went on from March 1996 to September 1996, when his group lost the fight and the Post Office selected a bespoke system that utilized middleware from Escher, referred to as Riposte. It was non-technical Post Office executives who declined the buy-in technique, he included.
Dreadful misgivings
Lloyd Thomas stated he had awful misgivings. “It belonged to betting,” he informed Computer Weekly.
In late 2022, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry heard that the groups entrusted with composing the Epos software application were likewise not up to the task.