The UK Home Office has successfully transferred a handful of critical functions to Oracle Cloud in order to modernise central back-office processes. 

The central government department, which employs more than 35,000 people, has migrated HR, payroll, finance, customer support and employee analytics services to Oracle Cloud to automate, standardise and integrate these processes. 

The adoption of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications suite of business services will also see the Home Office modernise and improve its finance, HR, procurement, customer support and expense systems. 

Specifically, the department has adopted Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management for HR functions, including payroll, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) for service and support. This builds on the department’s previous implementation of Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for finance.

These cloud migrations aim to boost productivity and reduce long-term costs at a time where there’s growing pressure on public finances due to the government’s coronavirus response. 

“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,” said the Home Office’s chief people officer, Jill Hatcher. 

“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.”

The Home Office had previously worked with the Government Shared Service (GSS) to develop a blueprint that other government departments could use to move their own key business processes to the cloud.

Developed with help from Fujitsu, SSCL and Accenture, the project dubbed Metis began by moving the Home Office’s finance, procurement and expense systems to Oracle Cloud ERP. 

“Recent disruptions and challenging economic forecasts have put pressure on many government departments,” said Oracle’s executive vice president for Applications Development, Steve Miranda. 

“We’re proud to help the Home Office of the UK 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.”

The government, last year, signed a string of deals with major cloud providers, including AWS, UKCloud and Google Cloud in order to offer public sector organisations a plethora of options for easy cloud migration.

In October last year, Oracle launched a next-gen dual-region government cloud for use by UK public sector organisations and their partners, including access to a host of cloud-based services such as Oracle Cloud VMware and Kubernetes.