This is the third post in a series of lessons from the Shared Services Strategy for Government. For those new to this series, the Shared Services Strategy seeks to bring together all 18 UK government Departments and about 200 Arms-Length Bodies into five clusters, sharing services based around five ERP platforms. These clusters are Defence (using Oracle ERP), Overseas (Oracle), Synergy (Oracle), Matrix (Workday) and Unity (SAP).
The views here are my own and, even though I spent five years at the centre of this programme, they do not represent government policy.
I believe that the sequencing of the onboarding of Departments into the three multi-deparment clusters (Synergy, Matrix and Unity) could have been approached differently. The focus in Synergy and Matrix in particular was on getting departments off of “burning platforms” and focusing on getting some early returns on investment.
In Synergy, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) was scheduled to move onto the new Oracle Fusion platform first. Their current contract had been extended to the limit and there was a real urgency to getting them live. With about 90,000 users, there should significant value achieved once they are live on the new system. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) would be next, with the Home Office last.
The Home Office were scheduled last because they have already moved to Oracle Fusion: they were one of the pathfinder cloud ERP programmes, moving to Oracle Fusion in 2017. The thinking was that as they were already on a modern, stable solution, they weren’t under the same contractual or technology pressures.
There was a similar situation in the Matrix cluster. With nine smaller Departments, they divided themselves into two groups: the early adopters and the existing cloud users. They technology they chose was different (Workday), but the reasoning was similar: get those with an urgent need onto the new system first, while those already on modern systems could wait.
I believe this was the wrong approach.
In Synergy, the Home Office has huge expertise in Oracle Fusion, probably the most of anyone in central government. Having that team working at the heart of the Synergy programme would have been a huge benefit: they could have greatly accelerated the programme and increased the skill base of the programme team. As it is, they are isolated from the programme and focused on maintaining their current system for several more years. The Home Office needs to continue to support the needs of their organisation so has to keep spending and investing in a platform that will be switched off in a few years. I expect there will be more than a few in the Home Office who are secretly hoping that the Synergy programme stops before it reaches them.
The same story is replicated in the Matrix Cluster. The Department for Education (DfE) already uses Workday for their HR service, and some of the Arms Length Bodies also use Workday. If DfE were brought to the front of the queue, their expertise and skilled team would have been at the heart of the Matrix programme instead of being out of the loop.
Unity had a slightly different challenge, in that they were all SAP ECC6 users looking to migrate to a shared S/4 HANA platform. DfT had an existing programme called the Future of Shared Services (FOSS) that they had been working on for several years, so once the technology contract was confirmed as SAP, that was used as an accelerator by the Unity programme. HMRC and DfT were scheduled to go first, with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) last.
MHCLG were concerned as this was placing them very close to the cut-off for the end of support for ECC6, so they went ahead with a quick upgrade to S/4 HANA. As a small department with an experienced and capable SAP team they were able to complete this very rapidly, using the DfT FOSS work as a template.
I believe that Unity should have started with MHCLG, as their agility and experience would have accelerated the whole programme.
The main lesson here for others considering implementing shared services is to think about where your best experience and expertise is located and build the new service around them. Otherwise you risk isolating them from the programme which increases the risk that they could act in ways that are harmful to the overall programme or leave altogether as they don’t see a future for themselves.
The loss of a few people may seem minor when considering the scale of these programmes, but the UK government has a systemic lack of technical expertise and is over-reliant on contract resource for too many critical systems. These experts cannot be easily replaced, as the Overseas cluster can testify. It’s exceptionally hard to recruit experienced ERP skills in government.
ERP Success 