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Tim Jones, chief exec: FCDO digital transformation: one down, four to go

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Tim Jones, chief exec: FCDO digital transformation: one down, four to go

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.

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Can the UK’s shared services mastermind really modernize Whitehall IT?

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Can the UK’s shared services mastermind really modernize Whitehall IT?

When Nathan Moores set foot in a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) meeting at Portcullis House in January, he was, in his own words, “a little nervous”. It was the first PAC gig for the shared services strategy director at the Cabinet Office, during which the focus was on the shared services cluster strategy. Through five clusters, the ambitious plan is to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems under one SaaS roof.

Shared services budgets and project progress were up for scrutiny once again by the PAC, and with good reason. Government department back-office operations cost around £500m a year to run. As the committee said, despite numerous attempts to reduce costs by implementing shared service strategies, “little progress has been made”.

It seems a tough one for Moores, the latest in a line of civil servants tasked with the shared services challenge. In December 2012, a Cabinet Office statement claimed that shared services would “save taxpayers up to half a billion a year”. And yet, in 2016, a PAC report said that rather than save money, shared services were actually costing the taxpayer an additional £4m.

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The UK government wants to reload the Matrix. But is there a glitch?

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The UK government wants to reload the Matrix. But is there a glitch?

To borrow a line from the Matrix everyone knows (you know, the Keanu Reeves classic), “choice, the problem is choice.” According to the architects of the shared services cluster strategy for the UK government, this also applies to the civil service and its lack of interoperability. It’s a problem for which the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) thinks it has a solution for, going by the name of the Matrix.

Speaking to a Public Accounts Committee in January this year about the proposed clusters, specifically the Matrix one, Nathan Moores, the shared services strategy director at the Cabinet Office, said that “departments have traditionally had their own view on how they would like to do HR, finance and commercial, so the big step change is to get the departments to work as clusters.”

Moores is going to have his work cut out. Eight central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems will hope to be brought under one SaaS roof. These departments range across HM Treasury, the Department for Education, BEIS and more. Half are already using Cloud technology; half aren’t.

As Moores embarks on what is called in the tender “a bundled procurement” for back-office IT services for Matrix, anyone could be forgiven if they are experiencing a moment of déjà vu. Government IT projects have poor form. As a National Audit Office (NAO) report on 25 years of government IT projects revealed a couple of years ago, “there is a gap between what government intends to achieve and what it delivers to citizens and service users, which wastes taxpayers’ money and delays improvements in public services.”

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