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.