Only last March, the minister for the Cabinet Office Jeremy Quin talked up the shared services strategy on its two-year anniversary claiming it could, hypothetically at least, save around £1.8bn over the next 15 years. Through five clusters, the project aims to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems under one SaaS roof.

This plan to modernize government back-office systems and find efficiencies is obviously ambitious with long-lead deadlines. But two years on, the government may actually have something to shout about. One of the departmental clusters has successfully completed its “go live” phase and unified its HR and finance operations on Oracle Fusion.

One of the five clusters in the shared services strategy, the Overseas cluster primarily consists of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), a body formed in 2020 through the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DFID). However, as Tim Jones, the interim director general for finance and corporate at the FCDO points out, the cluster is so much more than that.