Post Office bolsters its IT leadership team as it grapples with massive tech transformation with the nation looking on
The Post Office has created a new role to bolster its tech leadership team amid an ongoing project to replace the Horizon system supplied by Fujitsu.
This comes at a time when the organisation faces tough decisions over the move away from the controversial IT system used in all Post Office branches.
Subpostmasters were blamed for unexplained shortfalls caused by errors in the Horizon software, which was introduced in 1999. Hundreds were wrongly convicted of crimes based on flawed evidence from the system, in what is known as the Post Office Horizon scandal.
Paul Anastassi joins the Post Office from gaming and entertainment company Rank Group as interim chief technology officer (CTO). Acting CEO Neil Brocklehurst told staff in an internal message: “…we are keen to transition to our new Executive Operating Model as quickly as possible in order to deliver on the benefits of the Strategic Review for Postmasters and enable broader change as necessary.”
He added: “With this in mind, we have taken the decision to appoint to the CTO role on an interim basis whilst we complete the recruitment process for our permanent CTO, which is now underway internally and externally.”
Andy Nice, chief transformation officer at the Post Office, told Computer Weekly: “The interim CTO role was introduced to allow us to increase our technology leadership capability given our extensive and complex plans for this area, as well as enabling me to focus on the delivery of our strategic transformation plan for the business.”
He said Anastassi has “excellent, relevant experience in creating and executing technology strategies to enable business improvement and growth”.
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).
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