Like all large modern organizations, the MoD depends on the efficiency of a host of business services, such as finance, procurement and human resources. Instead of the Ministry and individual forces each running their own accounting, purchasing and HR departments, the MoD operates a central shared services model, delivered by its Defence Business Services (DBS) division.

DBS is responsible for the end-to-end delivery of these services, including not only expert staff and well-designed business processes, but also the underlying technology. Over the years, as DBS’s remit expanded, it inherited many disparate IT systems and data sources from different agencies within the MoD, ranging from large enterprise applications and databases to small custom-built tools and spreadsheets.

Managing this complexity was becoming a full-time job for the DBS team, and the maintenance burden made it difficult to deliver service improvements. The organization wanted to move toward a more modern, efficient operating model and recognized that standardizing and converging its IT landscape would be a vital first step — helping cut the cost of ownership, reduce maintenance and mitigate business risk.

“DBS is looking to simplify its system landscape for a number of reasons,” explains James Courtney-Holt, CIO Finance & Commercial Lead at DBS. “It will allow us to make best use of our core Oracle and IBM Cognos software and enable DBS resources. It will allow the internal DBS team to take full responsibility for the support and change of our systems. And it will prepare us for a move to cloud services in the future.”

Planning, budgeting and forecasting

Several years ago, DBS replaced a business planning system that had reached end-of-life with a new platform based on IBM software. Since then, the DBS and IBM teams have completed several upgrades to enhance the functionality, including a recent upgrade to the latest version of IBM® Planning Analytics software. The PB&F solution now supports both in-year management of the budget and forecasts for the current financial year and an annual budgeting cycle with a ten-year horizon for longer-term planning.

In addition to the plan and forecast data, the system also includes current financial data, enabling users to analyze variances between expected and actual results. DBS provides access to a wide range of tools to help users at different levels of the organization interact with this data — from workflows to help department managers contribute their budget data to powerful spreadsheet-integrated analysis tools for power users on the finance team.

Management information

In parallel with these projects, DBS has also created a centralized data warehouse for management information, drawing data from its accounting operations and CP&F systems as well as the PB&F platform and several other data sources.

Using the IBM Cognos® Analytics solution, users can access and visualize financial and operational information and automatically generate reports on cross-functional data. The platform breaks down data silos and helps eliminate the need for manual spreadsheet-based reporting — saving hours for analysts throughout the Ministry.

MoD decision-makers increasingly trust the data warehouse to provide robustly controlled data from well-governed source systems. This reduces the need for departments to maintain their own figures and helps ensure that decisions are made based on consistent, accurate information.

“We are looking to expand our Finance and Commercial analytics capability,” says Courtney-Holt. “Within the next 12 months, we will have expanded the warehouse to include HR, payroll and project data. We are also looking to share data with other Defence MI systems via APIs so that wherever the DBS data is ultimately consumed, it is taken from our warehouse as the ‘single source of the truth.’”