Home Office agrees back-office transformation deal

The Home Office has selected an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system delivered by Accenture and Certus Solutions to improve back-office services.

The two-year £20m contract, which was signed through the government’s G-Cloud, will transform the organisation’s human resources, finance, procurement, payroll and customer services. The Home Office wants to reduce costs, become more efficient and improve service levels through new technology applications and processes in these functions.

Accenture will configure the Metis ERP system, as it is known, on the Oracle Cloud platform.

“The Home Office is committed to cross-government alignment of back-office services,” said Richard Hornby, director of finance and estates at the Home Office. “This is an exciting project that will enable the Home Office to embrace opportunities for best practice ways of working in line with other world-class organisations.”

Accenture will take charge of programme management, business change, technical integration and client reporting.

Through the contract, the Home Office will transfer applications to a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for almost 30,000 users.

Certus has experience in deploying Oracle Cloud for government departments such as the Office for National Statistics.

The Home Office was one of the first public sector organisations to use services hosted in Oracle’s recently launched government-focused UK cloud region.

Oracle’s UK Government Cloud Region is touted as a highly secure environment in which public sector organisations can safely host their workloads.

The company said the service covered all 14 points listed on the government’s Cloud Security Principles checklist, which guides public sector organisations on how best to protect their off-premise data. It is also certified as safe for government departments to use under the Cyber Essentials Plus scheme.