Failure of Leadership

 

Following on from what I wrote a few weeks ago about Technology Ethics I read this article on the BBC website the other day which links to this article. Particularly the later one paints a shocking picture of the leadership culture that existed at the time (and may still exist today, we can only guess) inside Fujitsu UK.

Worth a note that responses to the questions presented by the BBC were email only, I guess they were afraid of a Prince Andrew style on camera interview.

However you look at this it highlights some serious underlying failings in the leadership style inside Fujitsu UK where the CEO did know in detail about the issues being encountered, this only happens one of two ways (i) the leader was so hands off as to not to care with "don't bother me with detail attitude" or (ii) the leadership team under the CEO at multiple levels had no integrity and were either not prepared to share bad news or were too scared of leadership at the CEO level to share the facts.

However you look at both these scenarios it paints a very damning picture of the leadership culture inside Fujitsu UK during this period. During this whole period Fujitsu UK had a very poor track record of contract delivery, the Benefits Agency contract being another example of this, which cost Fujitsu UK over £180M when the agency pulled out.

You then have this quote from a former CEO of Fujitsu UK who described winning the Post Office contract for ICL as "his proudest moment". How that quote should be haunting the individual now.

At least the current Fujitsu UK CEO seems to have seen the light (at least in public) which is something missing from his predecessors when he said that there had been "bugs, errors and defects" with Horizon from the start, and apologised for his firm's role in the scandal.

The UK government seems to have a fundamental flaw it the procurement process across whatever department, the MoD often comes in for the most criticism, one of the more recent ones is the Type 45 power plant issue which is costing the British tax payer £160M. It seems the MoD has not learnt anything from the old days of cost plus contracts and scope creep.

Something is fundamentally wrong in the culture of UK Government procurement at all levels and especially accountability, as the Post Office is publicly owned not only is the UK tax payer picking up the cost of the public enquiry but they are picking up the cost of compensation as well as already having paid the cost of the now proven to be flawed litigation in the first place. Why aren't Fujistu paying the UK taxpayer back all the costs associated with the original litigation, the public enquiry and the compensation? As none of us have ever seen the contract we can only guess, but I suspect the savvy lawyers at Fujitsu excluded all such costs.

As I said in my last post on a personal note I worked with many people at Fujitsu in Japan for twenty years at all levels and I always found their ethics to be beyond reproach even with things that were difficult and I had a lot of respect for them and very much enjoyed working with them.

Technology Ethics

 

 

I've been reading a lot about the scandal of the UK Post Office Horizon IT system and what seems a knowingly deliberate attempt by executives at both Fujitsu UK and the Post Office to cover up what was a known set of issues.

I've been involved in technology development at all levels for over 33 years (more if you include the time when I worked whilst at University and writing code as a kid growing up) and it is fair to see I've seen my fair share of bugs in both hardware and software, some of those have been very expensive (both commercially and technically, in terms of engineering time and materials to fix). The specific details of which I will never ever discuss with anyone.

I've also on a few occasions actually had to appear in court as a witness on IT related matters, the details of which I'm not permitted to discuss here. The consequences of shall we say mis-representing the facts in this later scenario carry far broader personal and commercial consequences from perjury, perverting the cause of justice, fraud, the list goes on and as in the case of the Horizon scandal the ruining of peoples lives, including people taking there own lives.

However what is now coming to light during the statutory enquiry both in evidence being given and the inevitable leaking of documents calls into question just how ethical the people involved were. As both an employee and employer you have a duty of care, confidentiality and the like, but just how far do you take that, what do you do if you are knowingly being asked to commit perjury or pursue someone based on evidence that you know is at best tainted but more probably materially flawed? I find some of the evidence being given where people keep saying "I had no knowledge as an investigator of others experiencing the same issue" just not credible or believable. It is hard (impossible) to keep this kind of information secret within a large organisation.

I've always had a view that internally within a company full disclosure of the root cause of the issue no matter how ugly and painful that disclosure is is appropriate, as anyone that has ever worked with me will know. I'm not interested in public shaming and humiliation because people are human and whilst the likes of ChatGPT writes OK code, although I do have to say it needs serious code review and even after multiple ones of those it is not something that doesn't need further modifications by a human and rigorous testing, we are a long way from code generated this way being safe to deploy to production without serious oversight. What I am and always have been interested in in these scenarios is RCA - Root Cause Analysis with appropriate corrective action, that feedback loop where mistake are learnt from and change is made. Now to be clear that doesn't mean if a person consistently makes the same mistakes then appropriate action shouldn't been taken in line with a companies HR policy.

There comes a point where people involved have to question the ethics of a company that pursues people and covers up bugs such as those that existed in Horizon, to be clear there will still be bugs in Horizon, they just haven't found them yet, no IT system is bug free and when your delivering anything like Horizon you have three things to bear in mind, time, features and quality, you can have two from three and it is clear in this case they sacrificed the one that gets sacrificed the most, quality.

I really hope that if the same thing ever happened again (and it will) the IT industry has moved on enough such that someone would be a whistleblower and that people would actually listen to that whistleblower and they could do it in a way that doesn't ruin them personally.

On a personal note I worked with many people at Fujitsu in Japan for twenty years at all levels and I always found their ethics to be beyond reproach even with things that were difficult and I had a lot of respect for them and very much enjoyed working with them.

Building a Spanish Silicon Valley

Living and working on the Costa del Sol has many advantages, not least 300 days of sunshine a year. The overall lifestyle is very different, in the Winter you can snow ski in the Sierra Nevadas above Granada and jet or water ski in the Mediterranean in the afternoon. The availability of fresh fruit and vegetables and the food miles they travel is far less than most places with a very short time from field to table as well.

Driving around the Costa del Sol, actually looks a lot like driving around Silicon Valley in California, even a lot of the place names are the same, to be clear California got the names from countries like Spain, not the other way round.

Back in 1992 the City of Malaga and the Junta de Andalucia started the tech park just to the north of Malaga next to the airport. Since then many companies have opened up offices in and around the tech park and the local area, once such company is VirusTotal, found in 2004 and acquired by google in 2012. Many internationally recognized companies now have offices, such as Oracle and Accenture.

Part of that is connectivity, Malaga airport is literally 20 minutes from the Tech Park. Malaga airport has as much runway capacity as London Heathrow, with none of the restrictions around flight times and is currently at 20% of the volume that goes thru' Heathrow. Another part of connectivity is internet connectivity, I wrote about this several months ago.

Most recently a number of existing and new companies have announced significant investment into the Malaga area, google announced the creation of a Cyber Security centre. Followed in January 2023 by Oracle are both examples of existing companies, with AES being the most recent new arrival.

In the Autumn of 2022, direct flights from Malaga were announced, technically it was a resumption, United announced three times a week flights to Newark airport in New York and just this last week the first tickets went on sale.

Spain provides lots of incentives now for people to come and work in Spain, historically Spain had the Beckham Law, named after a certain footballer and essentially means if you haven't worked in Spain are not a Spanish citizen and have a job to come to you can move to Spain and earn upto 600K/year and pay only 24% tax.

Spain also has the concept of Autonomo aka self-employed, for those that are familiar with IR35 in the UK it is a far more friendly version of that to actively encourage people. The what you can deduct is more expansive and the contributions you need to make to the social security system incentivize you by offering reduced contributions over the first two years.

Finally Spain recently announced incentives for startup companies and the Digital Nomad visa. The Startup Law again offers incentives to companies it has been estimated that the Startup ecosystem in Spain is worth €46B and the law is designed to support this and future growth. The details are all here.

Spain also has the Digital Nomad visa which is essentially designed for people who want to work for a foreign company whilst based in Spain. The tax model for Digital Nomads is based on the 24% for the first 600K/year in the Beckham Law.

If you want to learn more about living and working on the Costa I'd strongly recommend a read of this blog. I'd essentially end up repeating a lot of stuff that is here.

A Bonfire of Common Sense

One of the many things I've discovered about living outside the UK is that the BBC is not the news organisation that many believe it is and definitely does not deliver the impartial view of the world that everyone thinks it does.

We are fortunate to have frankly channels from more countries than you can possibly watch in a lifetime but when you watch them you get a very different perspective on world events. There seems to be a prevailing view that the BBC has got more like a Tory mouthpiece of recent years (surely that can't have anything to do with the appointment of the new Chairman being a mate of Boris'?).

Anyway that aside it is fair to say that the rest of the EU has long since moved on since Brexit and is very focused on growing the collective economy, sadly the UK is still stuck in that post Brexit rut. Inflation for example is already falling far more sharply in the EU than in the UK, both at a country and as a trading bloc level, growth is going to exceed expectations from the likes of the IMF in 2023 for all G7 countries, except the UK.

Just look at the issues in the UK, most economists say that Brexit is having at least a negative 4% impact on UK growth, the UK economy is the only G7 economy not to be back where it was pre-pandemic plus it'll be the only G7 economy to show negative growth in 2023. Even the Russian economy, despite sanctions will grow in 2023! In fact it is expected to be the slowest growing G7 economy for the next two years!

Why does the UK media like the BBC not lay out these stark facts to the British public? The cost of living crisis in the UK is beyond any joke and it is currently experiencing a "Winter of Discontent" and we all know how the last one of those ended. Then this morning you have stories of energy suppliers actually breaking into homes of vulnerable people to install pre-payment meters, whilst the government and the regulator stand by on a problem that has been know about for years? Why? Because these are the same people that bankroll the corruption in Downing Street.

Then of course the UK has this sunset clause for some 4000+ pieces of EU legislation that it plans to repeal by default on the December 31st 2023, that assumes of course they can actually find them all 🤣. The monetary cost alone of doing this both on the Civil Service and in legislative time is something the UK cannot afford or even achieve in the time. The UK was one of the countries that voted for this legislation and saw real value in it, like consumer and employee protection, data protection, security, anti-money laundering and fraud, the list of laws that will just expire is beyond comprehension and most people resident in the UK have no understanding of the consequences to daily life, why because mainstream media makes no attempt to explain this people. The governments solution is to use the so called Henry VIII clause which allows the government to make decisions on legislation without recourse to parliament, seems like the mother of Parliaments has just got a divorce from the Government.

For those who are employees the impact of the change should be particularly concerning as a long time friend and former colleague of mine posted a few weeks ago here.

The UK Government's excuse in all of this is it is all down to wider economic factors aka The War in Ukraine. If Brexit and the Tory economic policies were such a great decision then the UK should be outperforming the EU as a trading bloc inspite of wider economic factors, reality is Brexit was suicide, the EU has moved on and the UK population is paying a price, sadly no political party, no even The Liberal Democrats is saying rejoin is the right answer. Sir Ed Davey on GMB this morning when pushed multiple times on this, despite it being LD policy refused to say he wanted the UK to rejoin. 

The sad reality is the best the UK can hope for in the short term is closer ties with the worlds largest trading bloc, but that won't happen until the blinkered idiots in the Tory party and to some extent the other parties actually move on. It is not just about trade it is about co-operation on many topics such as security and finance. Reality is a see change in UK politics is required which requires my childrens generation, born in the 80s and 90s at the end of the last century and later who have only ever known the UK in the EU get into politics and change things. A lot of the generation that voted leave have departed this world and left a car crash behind them. Those still around like Truss, Johnson and Sunak having got the guts to admit the reality.

Maybe the UK will benefit from Brexit in 50 years time as JRM says, but by rejoining the EU...

Somewhere over the Atlantic

Been a few years since I've sent anything or posted anything from an Airplane, the last time seriously was on Singapore Airlines, probably 10 years ago, aside from the odd social media post since then.

Spent the majority of the years prior to the pandemic flying on BA, for reasons best known to BA they had this large global network but decided not to fit out the new fleet of planes with WiFi, opting to wait and see what everyone else did and then retrofit, seemed a bit of an odd approach to me, but apparently wasn't just driven by initial upfront cost but also the extra weight and the cost that incurred.

Now post the pandemic global business is very different and with people flying a lot less and relying on the technology I don't often get chance to use the tech that comes in planes.

Today I'm going from Malaga (AGP) to Newark, NJ (EWR) via Lisbon (LIS), the second leg of the flight has onboard WiFi, so I'm taking the opportunity to post something, albeit not very exciting.

TAP Air Portugal use A321LRneos on the route which seems to work, at least on the experience so far pretty well.

We are currently about 3 hours in at 33,000ft or around 10,000m.

Had this been available more broadly on the BA fleet I'd have definitely used it. On TAP Air Portugal is you just want to use simple message services like WhatsApp it is actually free.

The EU has released opened the possibility of using 5G on your handset whilst flying, can't believe it'll be included in yoiur tariff as the operators won't make any money if they do. 

The technology continues to evolve and it won't be long before video conferencing whilst flying is the norm along with streaming from the likes of Netflix.

 

Sad start to the 2022-23 ski season

After three years of a ski season blighted by COVID, resorts were hoping to get a good 2022-23 season and to be fair it started off well we had a good few days prior to Christmas. We went back to the UK for a few days over Christmas and as we left on the 23rd it basically started raining, it rained for days both in the Alps and in the UK, it was still raining as we headed back from the UK on the 28th.

Today the runs look more like Easter than January and based on the current forecast it'll be end of January before runs are closer to the normal for the time of year as the forecast for next few weeks, whilst it does forecast snow it really is not enough to recover the situation, the likelyhood of some of the lower resorts opening at all in the 2022-23 season is sadly looking unlikely. Some resorts have run out of the water supply they need for snow cannons as well, despite collecting it from meltwater and rain that falls.

It is already affecting professional skiing, with the Swiss resort of Adelboden resort planning this weekends Alpine Cup on artificial snow.

Investment in resorts has continued during the disrupted last three years with many new chair lifts and cable cars open, with what will amount to a forth year of disrupted seasons the hope is that that investment will continue, although some of the lower resorts may find it increasingly difficult to find the capital needed, often tens of millions of Euros for a new lift.

We have a weather station in the garden at our house in St Gervais and December was 3C warmer in 2022 than 2021, so far in January it is even worse!

People have been saying for years that resorts below 1000m will struggle increasingly, this year even those in the 1000-2000m range are struggling, to be sure of snow you have to go upto 2000m and then the quality of that snow is sadly questionable.

Ironically the Sierra Nevadas in Spain despite being the most southerly resort in Europe is having a good start to the season so far, by there standards, they are used to patchy snow and typically the quantity of snow picks up towards the end of January, an approach the Alpine resorts might have to get used to. They also have infrastructure to cope with regular patchy snow.

 

 

Global warming is proving itself to be even more of a reality that continues to affect more and peoples livelyhoods at a rate far faster than anyone could have judged. 2022 will for sure once the figures are finalised beat 2016 as the hottest year on record, the top 10 current hottest years on record have all been since 2010. It still baffles me how supposedly rational people can be climate change deniers, the facts are before your eyes, open them. Most of them of course are of a generation who won't have to live with the consequences (led by corrupt liars like hopefully soon to be proved to be a criminal Donald Trump, even the UK equivalent when he was in power didn't subscribe to that theory) so probably don't care either. Whilst I won't have to live with the worst of them, my children will, so be responsible. The world can ill afford yet more pressure on an already downwards economic spiral.

Windsor Christmas Lights and a bit of a rant about 2022

As mentioned previously we did manage to do a third set of Christmas lights and like the previous two, it rained! The lights themselves were OK, out of all three sets I have to say the ones we preferred the most were the ones in the Botanical Gardens in Malaga, but they have had a few years of practice!

 

2022 (aside from three sets of Christmas lights all in the rain) went down in history for so many things, frankly a lot of them not good and just when we all thought the world would improve after 2020 and 2021. 

 

Sadly it was a lot of the same, sure travel was easier, but the war in Ukraine drove up energy prices where so many people in the world are essentially in fuel poverty (when a household spends more than 10% of there income on fuel costs), politics in the UK was a total car crash and as result it has made a bad economic situation worse. It is clear large parts of the world will be in recession in 2023 and sadly my country of birth apart from Russia has the lowest predicted economic growth of the G20 and is the only member of the G7 whose economy is smaller than before the pandemic. We shouldn't kid ourselves a large part of this (4%) is down to the suicidal decision to exit the EU. The UK also exited 2022 closer than the 1930s to a general strike and definitely heading to a "Winter of Discontent".

Russia continues to commit war crimes in Ukraine and the sad truth is that the war in Ukraine will likely continue for years and become a proxy NATO vs Russia conflict, back to the days of the Cold War of proxy NATO vs Warsaw Pact. The rest of the world outside the UK has its challenges, US politics continues to be as divisive as ever with a number of countries such as Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Finland (to name but a few) have some degree of national elections this year which will bring with it I'm sure the worst behavior in some people. The UK doesn't have to have one until 2025 as the Johnson government abolished the fixed term Parliament Act, sadly.

On top of that we lost some great people in 2022, from Mikael Gorbachev to Queen Elizabeth II, the best list I've seen of them is here.

Anyway on a slightly happier note I've shared within this some of the pictures of our trip to the Windsor Christmas lights.

 Happy New Year everyone lets hope 2023 is a step up.