OK, it’s time for one of these.
Books: I’ve recently read Mike Martin’s An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict
I’ve also got the MOD Lessons Learned Compendium on Iraq hanging about. It’s more like a “Lessons Not Learned in the Slightest” report.
I’d also like to compare LGI/Jimmy’s, per Savile report, and RBOS/Bank of Scotland, per Fraser, but someone will have to hold the bucket while I heave.
We might have a chat about what the hell a “systems house” is and what it has to do with Eric Pickles.
Back in my distant youth a ‘systems house’ was a company like Logica that did big bespoke systems.
Lots of names not around any more… Software Sciences, Systems Designers, Scicon, CAP.
Well, merged, sold etc. etc. Software Sciences, the one I worked for, floated off as Data Sciences and is now a bit of IBM. A couple of people I worked with are still there.
It was a kinder, gentler time.
From the Amazon blurb about the RBS book –
“In Shredded, Ian Fraser lifts the lid on the catastrophic mistakes that led the bank to the brink of collapse, scrutinizing the role played by RBS’s directors who failed to check Goodwin’s hubris, the colleagues who were overawed by his despotic leadership style, the politicians who created a regulatory free-for-all in which banks went virtually unsupervised, and the investors who egged Goodwin on.”
A list of issues that could be repeated for just about any story in the press today.