During the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts like Professor Dame Jenny Harries, Professor Sir Chris Whitty, Lord Vallance, and others stood daily alongside the British Prime Minister to brief the nation on the science guiding the government in mitigating the effects of the pandemic. Listening daily were as many as 7.1 million concerned citizens.
In 2021, Jenny Harries went on to become the first head of the newly established UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), emerging from the reorganization of Public Health England (PHE) and other health-related bodies.
This restructuring aimed to consolidate expertise and improve the nation’s preparedness and resilience against health threats. The agency’s formation was influenced by lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, which underscored the need for a dedicated institution focused on health security.
It has a clear mandate to protect the population from infectious diseases and environmental hazards, emphasizing proactive measures and rapid response capabilities.
Transforming finance, HR, and supply chain
As a newly formed agency, UKHSA needed a finance system to support their business and chose to adopt Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP. Dominic Finigan, Deputy Director Finance Transformation at UKHSA, explained, “In contrast to other government agencies that have taken a phased approach to deploying applications, module by module, the UKHSA were able to adopt the broad suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for ERP, HCM, and SCM starting day one. I consider myself privileged to lead a team delivering such a rich suite of applications. The power of Fusion is that all the modules are interconnected and optimized to work together. And for me, everything was there. We took a brave decision to go ‘big bang’ and are now seeing the benefit of that, leveraging all the connected data, as well as all the new AI investment.”
Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence complements Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications
One of the most significant benefits was the opportunity to adopt Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI), a family of prebuilt, cloud-native analytic applications for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. FDI is built to help organizations accelerate analytics and includes a fully managed Fusion Cloud data integration; prebuilt best-practice key metrics and domain expertise; and Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), Oracle’s comprehensive AI-powered cloud analytics platform.
Analytics spanning all back-office functions
Before the UKHSA was established, Public Health England had been using OAC and deployed custom analytic solutions as the business required. Now, FDI will be used by all executives managing budgets, as well as by their teams, and is being rolled out to finance and HR professionals across the agency. “We have realized that the platform can be used beyond just traditional finance and HR operations, especially with analytics and FDI, as well as the wider cloud platform (OCI),” Finigan said. “We can provide consolidated information across all our application modules, and that’s important to our business. In addition, we can merge core back-office information with external information. That’s going to be very valuable, and just as important to business users.”
As scientists, users are inherently curious
The agency employs 6,000 staff. Many of them are scientific professionals with over 30 different specialties, including data modelling and data surveillance, who are by nature curious and accustomed to exploring data. “There are a lot of PhDs working here,” explained Finigan, “who are very confident in their approach to data and information. Instead of filing a service request to change a dashboard or get information, they get the data and manipulate it themselves. But when people take information out of the core system, put it in a spreadsheet, work on it for a week or two, it’s out of date. They then wonder why the numbers don’t add up, but it’s because the data has moved on. At the same time, it’s inefficient if users come to me and my team and ask us to change to a dashboard, or ask ‘can you get me this information,’ or ‘I’ve got this question, what’s the right data source for me to use?’ They’ve got to find us, ask the question, and then wait for us to solve their question. And we often have priorities which delay the response.”
Empowering people to become data-driven
Finigan emphasises that FDI contains all the data they need —constantly updated —which means his team can empower users to become data-driven when they make decisions. “Instead of saying, ‘Here is a central dashboard that will answer all your questions,’ we want to make tools available to users and provide the knowledge and the confidence to enable them to use all the data as powerfully as they can from day to day, across multiple business domains —finance, HR, and supply chain.”
He explains, “FDI should be the place to get your information, rather than exporting it. Because of this, we are now having fewer arguments about whether the data is accurate. If the information derived from the data is wrong, it’s likely to be related to an error in a process.”
For example, if people are not adding annual leave into the system, managers can’t see when people are available or where resourcing pressure points might emerge. This is important when it comes to holidays: managers need to check when everyone has booked their leave to ensure there is enough staff to cover the holiday period. At another time, the question might be, “Are people taking the leave they are entitled to? As their manager, I’m concerned about people’s wellbeing.”
Ideally, FDI will allow Finigan and his team to be much more strategic, by improving the quality of information and the way it can be interrogated, especially with some of the new AI capabilities. Finigan said, “We need to be keeping ahead of the curve as Oracle innovates. We’re also tracking usage as a key metric because ultimately, we think data quality will improve with usage.”
Blending data from multiple sources
When it comes to blending Oracle Applications data with other data, Finigan sees advantages. For example, the agency uses a travel system which shows the types of tickets being used, the distance people travel, how are they traveling, and what days they travel on. Joining that data to staff records and using map functionality helps answer some interesting questions. “This person lives here and frequently travels to there. How can we optimize their experience?” Finigan noted, “Our job is to help people who have the responsibility do this type of analysis —who can see the business value. When I see this happening, I think that’s what success looks like. It’s as much about behavior change as it is about technology change.”
Measuring the cost of disease surveillance
The agency’s primary resource, after its people, is clinical data used to model health trends and disease outbreaks. In the future, there are opportunities to blend that data with core back-office data. For example, the agency is exploring how to measure the cost of managing an event by showing a visual map of a disease outbreak alongside finance information, making links between them to show how much any specific regional area needs to spend to manage the outbreak. With the new bulk data augmentation capabilities recently introduced into FDI, it will become much easier to securely blend financial and HR data with the clinical data.
Exploring the art of the possible
Finigan talks about the partnership his team has with users. “Part of our job is to help business users in the art of the possible, particularly with the new AI capabilities. We’re just starting to work with Oracle Digital Assistant and combining that with our own GenAI agent, which guides policy adherence in finance, HR, and procurement. But I think it could be extended beyond these areas. Predictive analytics is one area, but we don’t want to be telling the business what to predict. Instead, we want to be giving them the tools to help them interrogate their data —spot anomalies, outliers, trends —and interpret the business significance. The tools help, but it’s important that human judgment is also applied. We are an organization of scientists, so we are adept at applying judgment to discoveries and predictions.”
Follow these links to get more information on UKHSA and FDI, and you can always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.