Home Office completes transfer of all business apps to Oracle Cloud

The Home Office has expanded its deployment of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications suite to span HR, payroll, finance, customer support and employee analytics for its 35,000 staff.

According to the supplier, the department has implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) for HR including payroll, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) for service and support. This follows an initial implementation of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for finance, procurement, and expense systems.

Jill Hatcher, chief people officer at the Home Office, said in an Oracle statement: “The Home Office is one of the largest and most complex government departments in the UK to have successfully migrated all of its finance, commercial, HR and payroll footprint to the cloud. This programme has charted the path for other departments to build on our collective experience. This go-live is a critical step in delivering business technology that is more user-centric and allows the Home Office to continually evolve.”

Steve Miranda, executive vice-president, applications development at Oracle, said: “We are proud to help the Home Office standardise and modernise the way it works. Moving finance, HR and customer support to the cloud will help the department to deliver more value to UK citizens.”

In a briefing with Computer Weekly ahead of the supplier’s Oracle Live event this week, Miranda said of the Home Office deployment: “It’s an example of the movement of our customers to SaaS [software as a service]. It’s a larger public sector organisation and it is cross-pillar in that it is HR as well as finance and customer support to the cloud. It’s a great example of a large organisation that is more conservative or traditional than hi-tech or new companies moving to the cloud, and full suite.”

Miranda confirmed that the Home Office had made the move “in phases, which is fairly typical”.

The initial push was for cost savings and technology modernisation, he said, but as the pandemic hit, a “larger benefit was being able to shift more completely to working from home”.

Miranda also confirmed that the Home Office is ahead of the cloud applications adoption curve in government. “We have a number of others that are live in parts or under way, but the Home Office, in terms of completeness of suite, is in the lead,” he said.

The Home Office is also a customer of Amazon Web Services for public cloud provision.

The supplier said in a press statement: “By automating, standardising and integrating business processes across different functions, the move will increase productivity and reduce costs at a time when there has never been greater pressure on government resources.”

Fujitsu, SSCL and Accenture were its implementation partners on the transition project.

Oracle also confirmed that the Home Office has worked with Government Shared Services on a blueprint for moving business processes to the cloud that can be reused by other departments.