The Cabinet Office has stressed the importance of strategic suppliers in the wider government’s efforts to overcome challenges and become more productive.
Nick Griffin, crown representative at the Cabinet Office (pictured), referenced Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s plans to deliver up to £1.8 billion worth of benefits by 2029 by improving public sector productivity.
“Productivity is a key issue now, and technology is at the heart of that,” explained Griffin at the recent Oracle CloudWorld event in London. “We have to harness it. We’ve got a huge technical debt that we’ve got to service. We need to improve the infrastructure.”
Griffin said suppliers are needed to overcome the government’s challenge of siloed departments, and stressed the importance of adopting a ‘build once and share’ model.
“It’s too easy at the moment to develop something in one place and not have sight of that from other places,” he said.
“The mantra of ‘build one to use many times’ is something that our suppliers should be helping us with. Bringing that innovation to us and pointing out where we can actually save effort by not duplicating, building new things all the time.”
AI central to government plan to improve productivity
Griffin said artificial intelligence (AI) is “front and centre” of the government’s efforts to improve productivity.
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“There are some fantastic examples being used right now. But we need much more of it. Anything that our suppliers can do, including Oracle, to bring that to the table, to show us what we can do better is welcome.”
Griffin acknowledged the challenges around using data for AI in the public sector, but said he hopes security concerns “get in the way of actually harnessing the technology.”
“I think we can find a way through the security issues,” he said. “Because the advances there are so immense that we could really benefit from a number of examples…not just to speed things up, but to improve the accuracy of the data and the accuracy of the outcome as well.”
FCDO leading the way for shared services strategy
Griffin also detailed Oracle’s work with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), which has unified its HR and finance operations on Oracle Fusion.
The FCDO was formed in 2020 through the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DFID). It is part of a shared services strategy which, through five clusters, aims to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected software systems together.
Griffin said Oracle Fusion is “providing a platform to develop new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things across a very, very complex department, which has something like 300 geographies to service, and 40 or so other agencies to draw together.”
