Case Study : Transforming finance / UK Government Finance Function
The UK Government’s Finance Function is part of the country’s Civil Service. It brings together a diverse range of disciplines and expertise
Transforming finance
Case Study — UK Government
Finance Function
The UK Government’s Finance Function is part of the country’s Civil Service. It brings together a diverse range of disciplines and expertise — from strategic business partners to accountants, to risk and audit professionals. The Function is tasked with making sure public money is spent efficiently and effectively, ensuring the delivery of high-quality public services.
Collectively, more than 10,000 finance professionals are responsible for supporting the management of over £800 billion of public expenditure each year, as well as over £2,000 billion in assets and £4,500 billion of liabilities.
For an organisation as large and complex as the UK Government, ensuring a standard approach to finance is a challenge. In the face of a changing technological landscape and a greater demand for operational efficiency, the Government has launched a programme to make sure its Finance Function will play a more strategic role and to place technology at the heart of this strategy.
We spoke to Tim Wheelhouse, Head of Finance Technology.
Putting finance at the heart of decision-making
With a variety of operating models, financial systems and financial processes in use across government, the finance transformation aims to strengthen leadership and operating models. The aim is for finance to play an even greater role in decision-making across government. The new strategy, published in 2019, outlines the vision that finance should not just be about reporting and keeping score but also strongly focused on better informing and driving decision-making.
Skilled and passionate people are essential to the continued success of the Government’s Finance Function. Ensuring that the team is diverse and capable, with the right skills and the ability to adapt to a changing digital landscape is central to meeting the future needs of government and its citizens.
Building on previous successes
Previous transformation projects have focussed on the internal workings of finance — professionalising the function and improving processes. The current programme looks at finance as part of the wider functional ecosystem — building internal skills, processes and capabilities to enable better collaborative working with HR, commercial and digital functions.
Creating clarity around behaviours was a crucial first step. Through this and a better understanding of process outcomes, decision-making can be sped up, employees are empowered, and any convoluted governance procedures identified and removed.
Building finance capabilities
Capability building programmes are an important response to the rising impact of technology on finance roles. Career development is a priority, with new career frameworks defining roles and setting expectations. Data literacy, skills and capability are essential to maximise the return on technology investment.
“We need data literacy, we need digital skills and capability, and we need to be able to do that to be able to support technology. There’s no point bringing the best technology in the world in if you don’t have people who are sufficiently data literate. They can’t easily work with data scientists and they aren’t going to make the best use of the analytics.”
Tim Wheelhouse, Head of Finance Technology
The importance of digital skills to the future finance function has driven a greater diversity in recruitment. The new strategy aims to bring in skills from different functional areas and reposition development paths away from the traditional focus, which in the past focussed heavily on professional finance qualifications. For some roles, technology training combined with practical finance experience will aid the development of a broader, cross-disciplinary skills base.
“It’s about attracting people to come in with different skill sets and different capabilities and bringing them into the finance family. They might not be the typical finance person, and that’s fine because there should be no such thing as the typical finance person.”
Tim Wheelhouse, Head of Finance Technology
As functional maturity develops, departments and teams are working together more effectively and regularly engaging in higher-quality cross-functional conversations. The creation of common data standards and frameworks has enabled a systemwide view in which corporate service functions are able to discuss and contribute to areas such as policy and national data strategy with other departments. Common data standards and terminology between finance, HR and commercial teams are enabling faster, more joined-up decision-making.
“We’re far more strategically aligned. The question now is moving from the thinking and not only remaining aligned but really hitting the joined-up delivery.”
Tim Wheelhouse, Head of Finance Technology
The UK Civil Service ranks number one in the 2019 InCISE (International Civil Service Effectiveness) index and third in the world for fiscal and financial management.
Government Finance Function’s guiding principles for transformation success
• Have clarity of vision — what is finance transformation going to do and achieve?
• Ensure that the vision is bought into at a senior level and embedded and engaged with at all levels.
• Don’t do finance in isolation.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Always get the basics right. Someone, somewhere has done this before. Talk to them.
