I contracted for ICL around the time it was acquired by Fujitsu, working opposite the Post Office developers, some of whom were still learning C++ as they went.
I later worked at the Department of Health during the Blair-era restructuring, when management layers multiplied, Trust structures became increasingly fragmented, and PFI debt created long-term financial drag. I also encountered someone trying to sell internal documents, which says plenty about the governance culture at the time.
Then I saw the BBC go through outsourcing to Fujitsu, with assets sold off and then effectively contracted back.
Across utilities, government, healthcare and broadcasting, the pattern has been depressingly consistent: short-term accounting savings, long-term operational debt, and layers of complexity presented as reform. Problems are rarely solved. They are moved around, rebranded, outsourced, and made to look resolved until the next team inherits the consequences.
Capgemini, Fujitsu and the usual suspects do well out of it. The public sector gets another five-year spreadsheet win, while the real-world cost lands years later with someone else.
All rather depressing when you see it first hand and many stories I dare not tell, from Ministers and their `shadows`(what their assistants called), upper goverment stories and even from infosec days involving banks and financial intertutions and how links that should never be there were found. Networks connected by undocumented lines and other things that just make you go WTF at levels of disbelief, even No.10 dealings that again, best left unspoken.
Just a system that focuses on being seen to care, over actually careing and if you do care, you are either broken or scared for life.
Oh well, be another decade or two to unpick the debt bombing this time around and those that cause it, never held to account as seagull managment is now the norm in many walks of life along with doing little waiting for pensions with pension surfing. This that care, die, those who don't get promoted on lies.
I will write a book to be published when i'm gone(soon) and just not care then, until then, I care, just wished those with power actually did.