Shared Services Information Library

Very recently I was reading through an article written by Laura Stack named ‘Is your Organisation built for Speed”. Being a true believer and practitioner of Speed and Accuracy myself, the article brought back questions similar to what we have been hearing from Shared Services Professionals globally on how Shared Services need to operate. So what does “Speed” represent? How fast is “fast”? What is the measure of “fast”? And how does “Speed” in the Shared Services environment enable business to achieve its ultimate business goals? Is it just the expertise of the business operations teams or are your support services such as Finance, HR, Facilities, IT and other functions fast enough to enable and  achieve business goals.

The model of Business Shared Services in now being widely accepted as the future of support services of an organisation. So how and what should a Shared Services Professional do to ensure that the Shared Services that they set up really measures up to the needs of dynamic changes in business.

With my interaction with various Shared Services Professionals and Organisations over the years, I have realised that there are really no standard measures being used across the industry that are widely accepted. Most of the organisations or professionals are deploying their own measures and systems to figure out what is right for their organisation without a check of whether it is the right thing for them to do. Some of the organizations are using e-mails and excel sheets to run their Shared Services, whereas some are using advanced ITIL, Knowledge Management and Proactive Compliance tools to ensure that their Shared Services is run in the best way possible. I have seen good technology implementations fail miserably due to the fact that the there was no proper planning or implementation of the same. Most of the medium enterprises even think that Support Services are not crucial to their business and give importance only to their production/operations units.

How are the best organisations able to achieve much more than what can be achieved?

In today’s world of technology, the IT folks have understood the need and criticality of working in a structured and systematic manner and have developed for themselves the ITIL framework to achieve and deliver a standard level of services. The framework defines suggested SOPs to different situations and gives templates and procedures to rapidly and accurately deploy IT systems in an ever changing environment.

Support Services, in comparison, have long been considered as people averse to technology. However we now see an evolution, where old methods are evolving into systematic procedures driving a process driven culture trending towards rapid adoption of technology. It is a well-known fact that technology by itself cannot bring about change that we wish to see. The need of the hour is a holistic approach while implementing this change to the world of continuous transformation.

 The four key aspects in running a successful and dynamic shared services that is able deliver speed and accuracy, mostly depends on Culture, People, Technology and Operational capability of the Shared Services.

 

Although, replicating time tested operations models such as IT operations, Core Banking and Military operations, who have achieved excellence and sustainability, may seem to be the right way forward, there are function specific requirements which may need to be tweaked to ensure that the ecosystem that we develop as Shared Services Professionals is built not only for ‘Speed’ but for Accuracy and Continuous transformation.

What do we need to do as Shared Services Professionals?

In one of the earlier documents that was published on the SSON network about Implementing a Good Business Shared Service Center (http://www.ssonetwork.com/business-process-management/articles/how-to-kick-your-shared-services-implementation-in/)) , I had indicated of how we were able to rapidly deploy business shared services based on our successes in the  HR Shared Services.  I am sure that there are many other Shared Services Professionals who have experienced similar successes in what they have been able to do. But the flipside is that this knowledge is restricted to the confines of the company. And in today’s world of seamless knowledge sharing, this restricted knowledge may not add value to the business in a long run.

The idea is to converge this knowledge into measurable content, so that all shared services professionals are able to use and implement this knowledge to deliver competent shared services to business with speed and agility and not work on a ‘Trial and Error’ method. Although we see best practices being shared on various knowledge sharing and social networking sites, the knowledge is being continuously lost and not captured systematically for future use.

The need of the hour is to come together and form a single knowledge base, similar to that of ITIL, which can be the sole authority on the right standards to run a business shared services. This article is intended to pave the way for all shared services professional to put their heads together and create a single SOP of running a shared services centre with excellence. Networking groups such SSON can play a vital part in enabling a global convergence of shared services operations model so that Support Services will indeed will be called Business Enablers.