How to convince your C-Suite to use Shared Services as the prime engine for their organisation.

Most Shared Services’ professionals would agree and believe that the Shared Services way of working is the right way to set up and run internal processes of an organisation. But do your C-Suite executives believe in the Shared Services way? How do you convince them to design the organisation and provide more funds to your initiatives based on the Shared Services model? Are lowering costs the only objective of a Shared Services setup? Or are there other ways to project the ROI of Shared Services?

Shared Services ' Strategy to Transactions' Framework

Here are views of how to project Shared Services as a Strategic Model to implement, operate and fine tune the internal strategy of your company.

Currently, many CXO’s believe that the work of Shared Services is to efficiently manage transactions to lower operational costs. While lowering costs and bringing efficiency is native to Shared Services, what many people don’t know is that Shared Services, with their voluminous data and process handling capabilities, are slowly developing the capability to implement concepts such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With most of the Shared Services transactions moving online now, Shared Services, if designed well, can tap into Big Data for various predictive and preventive technologies which can help organisations move away from transactions and work on projects that give organisations the edge over competitors.

So how does Big Data and AI help the organisation achieve its Internal Strategy?

It is a well-known fact that 70% of internal strategy implementations of organisations fail due to various reasons. There have been many articles written and many views shared on this topic. Shared Services with its systematic Knowledge Management, Compliance Management, Operations and Problem Solving culture can be the answer to bring down the failure rate of implementations thus enabling more success for the organisation’s initiatives.

All that would be needed from the C-Suite executives would be to articulate their Internal Strategy for the organisation and Shared Services, with their Knowledge Management Systems, will be able to convert them to various policies and business processes. With the help of the Shared Services Compliance Management systems, risk scores against each process and policies can be assigned to each of the controls that manage the polices/processes. Shared Services, with its innate ability to handle Big Data, can map all company transactions captured through their transactions hub back to a business process and in turn to a policy on a real time basis. This matrix of Strategy – Policy – Process – Transactions Framework will then give a real time view of the ‘Risk’ associated with the company’s internal strategy. So what you have is a system of mapping every transaction in the company to the internal strategy and the risks associated with it.

So instead of waiting in periods to review your strategy, the C-Suite gets a real time dashboard of what’s going right in their strategy and which part of the strategy needs a quick fix to get it back on track. Shared Services can own up to ensure the organisation is back on track immediately. This way, CXO’s can concentrate on the external strategy of the company and leave the implementation and operations of the internal strategy to the Shared Services. The problem of doing reviews in periods is that there may have been irreversible damage done to your strategy which could have been avoided if the systems were able to capture them as and when they were taking place. Seems more of a scene from a sci-fi movie? Well, it’s really not that difficult to implement…

So what tangible resources are required to make this a reality?

Although there is no one single tool that can achieve this today, this concept can be easily implemented with an amalgamation of various tools that are currently available in the market. So what tools do we need?

ITSM Suite: ITSM Suites, generally called ‘Case Management Tool’ in Shared Services are available in plenty. Most of them fulfill the need of capturing data to enable Big Data and AI. However, they need to be tailored to the needs of the respective business functions such as HR, Finance, IT, Facilities etc. This generally is not a herculean task but will require meticulous work from the Shared Services team.

These tools enable Six Sigma concepts of DMAIC which is required for continuous improvement of the organisation. What this tool ideally does is to capture all transactions of the company either through self-service, calls or e-mails and convert them into systematic data for analysis and subsequent changes based on the analysis. Over a period of time, if this suite is implemented well, it can provide instant answers to employee queries and issues thus enabling AI. This will also provide real time trending on Process and Policies implementation thus enabling instantaneous view of the organisation’s strategy not just to the CXOs but also to all employees in the organisation based on their areas of responsibilities. This way all employees are crewed into the organisation’s strategy and vision.

If the ITSM suite does not have an inbuilt capability to manage knowledge and process compliance, additional Knowledge Management and Process Compliance Management tools need to be implemented. The Process compliance tool will play a major part in providing real time risk analysis whereas Knowledge Management tools will help in managing knowledge which will be required for AI related initiatives in Shared Services.

If the combo of the tools are implemented well, the internal strategy of the company can be realized efficiently, effectively and rapidly to give the organisation an internal edge over the competitors. With this framework, Shared Services will no longer be a transaction hub but a Strategy enabler for the organisation.

All CXO’s want their organisations to move as fast as a jet plane to achieve the organisation’s goals. But what is important in a Jet plane is the efficient Jet engine which enables the Jet and the people in it to propel at that speed.  Shared Services, if implemented well, can be designed to be the internal jet engine of the organisation which efficiently and effectively hums to provide the speed and reliability for the organisation to achieve its goals.  So in short, Shared Services is now ready to move from the classical ‘Cost Saver’ Organisation to a savvy ‘Strategy Implementation’ Organisation.