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I liked that Troubleshooter programme, and Sir JHJ.

So it is with a slightly puckish tone I suggest that surely Sir John Harvey Jones was just using another KPI, by adopting profit as an indicator of performance.

ROI is probably the KPI that counts most in business, provided we measure it over a long enough time period, (though not too long on promises of "jam tomorrow").

I used to think management thought too short term to invest in better software practices. To the young, a revolution is fervently appealing, but now older, and more jaded, having seen the bandwagons come and go, it is my secret delight that I am turning into an old grey-haired donkey, like Benjamin in Animal Farm, quietly keeping track, for, as with all politics, office politics is about rewriting history on the end wall of the big barn, by those in charge, the pigs.

Such doubts are all-pervasive, so there are moments when I reflect I might be deluded in casting myself as the heroic wise donkey, when in fact I am more in charge, more responsible for the state of the world, to the point that I might be just another one of the pigs.