Dave's List Vol 3 Issue 3 📨
Trouble on the horizon
Hello folks!
I have spent the last week reading The Great Post Office Scandal by Nick Wallis, and it has been at times jaw-dropping. I knew a bit about it from reading the odd article on Computer Weekly, and had the vague impression about a poor IT implementation resulting in miscarriages of justice. However, the devil, as they say, is in the detail.
In short, the Post Office’s Horizon system, which went live in 1999, sought to digitise the workings of counters up and down the country. However, when errors started appearing in the accounts of some of those running Post Offices, the workers took the full brunt of the blame, because the organisation refused to accept that the system could contain any errors at all. As a result, people lost money, their jobs, and in some cases their freedom.
Reading that paragraph back, it seems ludicrous. How could the Post Office claim that a large, complex IT system didn’t have bugs or errors? How did they convince juries and judges of this? It sounds patently nonsensical. But it happened.
The thing is, I’ve always carried round in my head the idea that Horizon was a terrible piece of technology. There are reports that, in many ways, it wasn’t great. But that wasn’t the real issue here. After all, this thing was huge, and the fact that it worked at all is frankly amazing to me. But the truth is that in the vast majority of cases, one way or another, it seemed to work pretty much ok.
The problem was the organisational culture prevalent in the Post Office and their supplier Fujitsu, which would not countenance any possibility of errors in the Horizon data. Even for perfectly understandable reasons! A lot of the data in Horizon had to be sent from Post Offices back to the central servers for processing, and that needs data connections, which we all know can be problematic. Broadband cuts out. Power cuts happen. Obviously well-design systems design for that failure, but even so, it’s impossible for every eventuality to be accounted for. And yet the PO and Fujitsu claimed that any errors simple could not happen - and people in power believed them.
It wasn’t the technology that failed those subpostmasters who were put through this miscarriage of justice, it was the culture of the organisations they were working with. What makes it all even worse is that, from the recent evidence of the ongoing public inquiry, that culture is still pervasive after all this time.
Anyway, I am sure I have made mistakes in some of the above, they are just my reflections on reading the story. It’s a complex one though, and it might be that in my usual way I’ve over-simplified. Have a look at this campaign website which features a lot of coverage of the scandal and the ongoing public inquiry, and I would really recommend reading the book, too, so you can get some understanding of this awful episode.
This issue’s links
I loved my time at Adur & Worthing a few years ago, and that was before Catherine Howe became CEO there, so it must be even better these days! They currently have an opening for a Head of Technology and Design, if you fancy it (you have 4 days left to apply).
Stockport Council on their journey since signing the local digital declaration.
There is so much to ponder on in this article: “There is too much noise – too many notifications that become meaningless, too many meetings that should have been.. (more noise..?), and almost no common agreement of which tool to use for what purpose. With a lack of shared norms on this, a little bit of everything ends up across an array of tools.” Anyone who has caught themselves wondering whether to post something in Teams or on Yammer will appreciate this!
Episode 2 of our daughter Jade’s podcast is out. It’s all about the job of being a social media manager at an agency. It’s good!
Cory Doctorow: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
I like this, from Terence Eden: "Build your own "On This Day" page for WordPress". Might look to implement that on my blog.
For years I lived in Evernote. This by Harry McCracken captures some of what made it great.
Ben Thompson on Threads and the state of social media.
Another unbearably infuriating game, you say? Welcome, Mineplacer.
That’s it for this issue. Don’t forget to hit reply if you have any feedback, or forward this on to anyone you think may enjoy it.
Until next time,
Dave ❤️