The Impact of Disruptive Business Trends are Causing a Rethink of Shared Services.
The concept and use of shared services have been around for almost 30 years. However, shared services have matured to a level of organizational standard practice for support services across multiple business units. Despite this evolution, the penetration of shared services that represent wholly developed and full capacity operations is relatively low. Today, businesses should expect to rethink shared services to deliver more than cost savings and anticipated service levels. Businesses should demand a high quality “customer experience” that provides comprehensive support, easy access to information and seamless integration into the business. The top five reasons that shared services operations continue to fall short of business expectations are still relevant (see the full list on page 2). Customer-driven Shared Services, when properly implemented, help the business focus more on delivering against strategic goals and objectives and less on managing non-core support services and technology. However, as the law of unintended consequences would have it, business innovations and trends have somewhat hampered the ability for organizations to fully realize these objectives. These trends have caused an increased demand to leverage support services in an integrated, consistent, and cost-effective manner while providing an optimal support service “client experience”. For a support service to provide the intended value to the organization, the strategy for service delivery, technology enablement, process management, customer support, and analytics must be clearly thought through and aligned to the overall business objectives of the organization.
