With the case of M&S, and in many other cases in UK tech history that have gone poorly, it's mostly examples of the failure of hiring outside consultancies in India to do everything. Business executives continuously fall afoul of the fungibility myth. They believe that engineers are fungible, and that they should therefore simply pay for the cheapest engineers possible that meet the "requirements" on paper, usually set by someone who is not an engineer (HR, project manager, or a lower ranked middle-manager).

Time and time and time again we have seen major failures globally, and especially in the UK, that prove that there is no fungibility of engineers, and that outsourcing the critical technical infrastructure for your core systems and services is doomed to failure. They'd rather save a dollar today and lose ten million dollars tomorrow by damaging their national economy and sending more money to India. India's GDP is basically entirely propped up by tech services, and most of that is /failed service delivery/, hard to differentiate from frauds and scams at scale.