Learning from IT Failures: Horizon, Bugs, and Chinooks - The UK Post Office Scandal (Part 2)

In the opening I introduced that the Horizon software was the main deliverable of a billion pound PFI project let by the Post Office. The contract was awarded in May 1996 to Fujitsu who won the job because of their winning offer to bear the software development costs in exchange for 8 years guaranteed transaction fee every time a customer of the Department of Social Service used their new swipe card in a Post Office.

It doesn’t take long for the deal and the software to go off the rails.

How on earth did this come about and why is it such a hard lesson for us to learn that it can be the technology at fault, not user error.

Source Material

Nick Wallis, ‘The Great Post Office Scandal’, 2021, Bath Publishing.

Paul Marshall, ‘Failed Justice - how commercial interest displaced the interests of justice in the Post Office case’, 30 March 2022, Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Legal Studies

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