After 16 years, ‘interim’ CTO finally eradicates Fujitsu and Horizon from the British Post Office – Slashdot

In addition to running the technical operations at the UK Post Office, so is their interim CTO removing and replacing Fujitsu’s Horizon systemwhich one Computerweekly describes as ‘the flawed software to which a public investigation is linked 13 people committing suicide.”After more than sixteen years of reporting on the scandal they first uncovered in 2009, Computerweekly join the conversation now CTO Paul Anastassi on his plans to finally remove every trace of the Horizon system that has been in use at post offices for more than 30 years – before the year 2030:

“There are more than 80 components that make up the Horizon platform, and only half of them are managed by Fujitsu,” says Anastassi. “The other components are internal and often from other third parties,” he added… The plan is to introduce a modern front-end that is device independent. ‘We want to get rid of it [the need] to have a certain device on a certain terminal in your branch. We want to offer flexibility in this….”

Anastassi is not the first person tasked with terminating Horizon and Fujitsu’s contract. In 2015, the Post Office began a project to replace Fujitsu and Horizon with IBM and its technology, but after things became complicated, the Post Office directors decided crawled back to Fujitsu. When it was proven in the Supreme Court that Horizon was responsible for the account deficits for which subpostmasters were blamed and punished, the Post Office knew it had to change the system. This culminated in the New Branch IT (NBIT) project, but this got into trouble and wash eventually abolished. This was before Anastassi’s time, and before that of his new top team of executives….

Things are finally picking up pace and by summer of this year two separate contracts will be signed with suppliers, marking the start of the final act for Fujitsu and its Horizon system.
Anastassi has 30 years of IT management experience, the article notes, and he estimates that the project will even provide “significant cost savings over what we currently pay for Fujitsu.”