The Financial Management Award Shortlist

Cost Pricing Team, HM Revenue & Customs

Spending on HMRC’s IT estate accounted for nearly a quarter of the Department’s £4.1bn budget, which includes spend on all IT equipment and services. A high-profile internal campaign, ‘Valuing our pounds’, helped drive awareness and change consumption behaviour within HMRC by encouraging managers to consider the cost of their team’s IT.

The campaign used a corporate approach to ensure messages were consistent. Finance directors received communications packs to help them explain the campaign’s aims to drive down the volume and usage of IT services and equipment.

For the first time, HMRC has comprehensive data on IT services and equipment in an easy-to-use format, accessible at all levels of the organisation. IT costs are embedded in the system that managers use to order IT services for their staff, e.g. licences. This means people now think about the cost of IT and managers are able to make objective and evidence-based decisions. This creates a highly efficient financial management model where decisions about IT services can be balanced between the cost of IT and business priorities.

The tool also includes costs of HMRC’s applications and encourages business areas to consider whether systems are offering value for money. Helping to inform decisions about decommissioning systems supports the HMRC 13 Machines Strategy, which underpins HMRC’s new customer-centric business strategy, and should lead to a £45m reduction in the running cost of our IT systems by 2014/15.