Performance Improvement in the Public Sector
Most public sectors organisations are seeing rapid cloud growth which is driving increasing data processing and storage costs to levels that may divert funding away from service delivery. A large UK government department engaged Capgemini to diagnose the underlying drivers.
An initial four-week review identified room for optimisation, bringing greater visibility to cost anomalies, cloud inefficiencies and hidden spend drivers, delivering £2.2m in immediate savings. This early success built trust with the government team and led to a multi-year partnership to create a sustainable, long-term way of managing cloud spend and performance across its entire technology portfolio.
The partnership began as a cloud cost reduction exercise and grew to address a more fundamental challenge: how could the department continue delivering essential public services under intensifying financial pressure, political scrutiny and rising operational demand? Without intervention, rising workloads combined with constrained budgets risked impacting service continuity, operational resilience and value for taxpayers. The mission therefore evolved to include strengthening the department’s ability to deliver more with less, sustainably and safely.
Our approach was to adopt a FinOps operating model, defining the roles, processes and tools required to manage, optimise and govern cloud spending across the department’s cloud-based platforms. This approach stabilised cloud spending, reduced waste and improved system reliability and throughput, while creating end-to-end visibility of cost and usage through allocation models, forecasting and unit economics.
We also trained more than 220 people across portfolios and roles, building a FinOps community so that teams could make better, value-driven decisions every day. The aim was to embed a cultural shift so civil servants could eventually run the FinOps model independently, reducing long-term reliance on suppliers.
Since engaging Capgemini, the department has saved or avoided more than £70m in cloud-related costs and is now 10% under budget for cloud spend for the first time, reversing a prior overspend trajectory. In addition, the cost per transaction for key services has fallen by 82%, from 0.25p to 0.04p, while search volumes more than doubled from around 600,000 to 1.3 million. Improved forecasting now helps inform government budgets and automation reduces manual efforts, enabling the delivery of faster services to the public and more resilient systems.
We also made the carbon impact of key cloud services visible to product teams. And by reducing and optimising the use of cloud resources, we were able to reduce the carbon footprint of key services by 23%.
We combined financial acumen, engineering depth, operating model design and understanding of behavioural change to solve public sector technology challenges in a way no single supplier or internal team had previously been able to integrate. What began as cost control exercise has become a blueprint for public sector performance improvement – embedding new capability within the department, with a model that other teams in the wider public sector, defence and national security can adopt.
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