Post Office creates CTO role

[erek]

"Post Office bolsters its IT leadership team as it grapples with massive tech transformation with the nation looking on​

The Post Office – under its new leadership, including recently appointed Nice – is in the midst of a huge project to replace the controversial Horizon system from Fujitsu, which is at the centre of the Post Office scandal.

Nice and his team were quick to act on arrival at the Post Office earlier this year, pausing the work being done on its planned Horizon replacement, the New Branch IT (NBIT) project.

The NBIT project to build an in-house software platform to replace Horizon was running late and hugely over budget. Costs had increased by £1bn and, as revealed by Computer Weekly in May, a government report described the project as “unachievable”.

There is still an ongoing debate at the Post Office about the way forward for the project, with claims the Post Office is set to buy the Horizon system from Fujitsu and combine it with in-house developed and commercially available software.

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below)."
Source: https://www.computerweekly.com/news...O-role-to-support-extensive-and-complex-plans

 

[pendragon1]

PO creates new IT oversite role. is that what its saying?

 

[jfreund]

It took me a few minutes to realize it's not USPS, and after a few more minutes, I still didn't know where it is.

 

[Lakados]

It took me a few minutes to realize it's not USPS, and after a few more minutes, I still didn't know where it is.

Europe I believe, they currently use a software suite named Horizon and it’s known for being bad.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036.amp


Horizon is their financial tracking and accounting suite and it glitched out and resulted in hundreds of employees being falsely charged with fraud. Cost a crapload of money in legal fees and compensation to sort out was a big deal over there.

Personal Anecdote:
I work daily in a database designed by Fujitsu and I swear to god you need a degree to operate it. It’s rock solid but if you look at it slightly wrong you will completely fudge your reports.

I suspect it was less of a system error and more a user error but the person who goofed up was high enough up the chain to deflect it back on the software.

Our Fujitsu system doesn’t do any fancy analytics we need to export “reports” and feed them into 3’rd party tools for that. I assume they do the same and they were generating reports to feed into some tracking/analysis system and that is what flagged the fraud. Easier to blame an annoying ugly database front end than the person using it…

 

[Comixbooks]

I want to work for the Post Office just for a day.

 

[Templar_X]

It took me a few minutes to realize it's not USPS, and after a few more minutes, I still didn't know where it is.

Same, the article is about the one in United Kingdom

Post Office Limited, [...], is a state-owned retail post office company in the United Kingdom that provides a wide range of postal and non-postal related products including postage stamps, banking, insurance, bureau de change and identity verification services [...]

Not to be confused with Royal Mail

Royal Mail and the Post Office are separate companies with independent Boards. Royal Mail is the company that delivers parcels and letters – the provider of the universal postal service. The Post Office is the nationwide network of branches offering a range of postal, Government and financial services.