Imagine you are the Head of a large Shared
Service Center catering to several countries with a large employee base and all that you have to do to govern your Shared
Services is to keep track of just one KPI to 100% called the SS Governance
Control. Your system suddenly beeps and warns you of a probable dip in performance
of your Shared Service Center to 99.99%.The system automatically isolates the
process step which is causing this risk and you mitigate it within seconds to
ensure your service delivery never falls below 100%. Does it look like a sci-fi
movie scene narration? It may today. However, in about 5 years this may be the
reality if( and its an "if") you are leveraging the advantage of Big Data enabled systems for
your Shared Service Center.
So what is Big Data? The world's technological per-capita capacity to store information
has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s. It is estimated that 2.2 million terabytes of
new data is being created each day. Data has swept into every industry &business
function and is now an important factor of production, alongside labor and capital.
The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the
rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel
exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future. Therefore ‘Big Data’,
simply put, is the collection of large data sets which are complex and
difficult to process using contemporary methods data processing methods.
Big Data in Shared Services/Outsourcing Centers. Shared Services Organizations are increasingly
moving to online solutions to operate the support services of their
organization. Employees, Manager, Function specific processors are progressively
using these multiple systems to access, request, raise and monitor issues
relating to various functions in the organization. The result is the generation
of a gigantic amount of data that is available for analyzing and improving your
businesses.
The challenges
of this huge amount of data include capture, curation, storage, search,
sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization of dynamic data for the
organization. We often see different functions across the organization working
on the same data but in different formats and wasting huge amount of time and
energy in doing so.
In
current scenario, leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the
implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers.Companies which
leverage the power of Shared Services and Big data are bound to be more
dynamic, responsive and more importantly proactive to the needs of their
customers or employees. If this data is not handled well, you can be rest
assured that the associates in your Shared Services are only going to struggle
with the huge amount of data that is being generated. In one of the Shared
Services that I worked with, we were able to save close to 3 FTE’s on a single
process as the Process lead, an expert in managing huge amount of excel data,
easily developed a process dashboard and workflow which simplified the entire process
with little or no effort, whereas earlier there was a big team trying to manage
this process with many escalations and constant follow up. On the flip side I
have seen some Shared Services/ Outsourcing organizations maintaining a large
workforce just to manage data and still not able to deliver world class service.
So how do you go about leveraging Big Data in your Shared
Services? The first and foremost step to leverage Big Data is to
have all transactions of your company channeled through a single ERP system.
The answer seems pretty simple. But how many of the ERPs out there give you
everything you need in a single platform? What components should the system
have to enable Big Data? A good system should be able to capture and relate
events right from the Company’s vision right down to the last transaction that every
employee transacts in the company. Right now, I don’t see a single ERP system
capable of doing this. But I see a lot of ERP systems heading in this direction
to deal with different capsules enabling Big Data.
What should you be doing as a Shared Service Professional
to ensure that your Center is ready to adopt Big Data platforms? The first thing is to build an agile and robust
Knowledge Management system. The things that you need to be doing are to
document, catalogue and index the Vision, Goals, Strategies, Policies, Processes,
Templates and Controls of your organization.
My experience
suggests that SharePoint will do a fair job of this if you are able to leverage
SharePoint well. However it is very important that the co-relation between each
Vision, Goals, Strategies, Policies, Templates and Controls is well established
and documented to ensure that we are able to navigate across huge amounts of
data with just a few clicks and not wasting time in searching for more
information. One of the biggest areas which can make or break your Shared
Service Center is how well you have designed your Knowledge Management system.
I have come
across some Shared Service Organizations which spend most of their time
searching for processes, documents and data instead of actually delivering
excellence by resolving issues rapidly. A good ‘Big Data’ system will look for
knowledge akin to rules or policies to deliver trends and proactively report
impending failures in your system. So you better have everything documented and
make it a culture in your Center to systematically record events in a simple
yet effective manner. Facebook is the best example of how Big Data can be
collected in a simple yet effective manner. There are a couple of very good
ITIL enabled systems which provide Shared Services organizations to effectively
deliver this way of working. Employing such systems in your organization will
ensure that every transaction in your organization is effectively linked back
to the vision of the organization in an instant, which otherwise would have
taken 70-80% of the time to achieve this objective. These systems also help you
isolate processes that are generating traffic in the organization on a real
time basis giving you the edge of running processes efficiently and proactively
rather than waiting for escalations to correct your process. These systems
however require a good knowledge management system to govern and set rules for
it.
So what is it that you choose for your Shared Service
Center? A multitude of employees vigorously working on huge
amounts of data? Or Smart Employees who are looking to breakthrough to new ways
of working to give your Shared Services the edge – and at the same time improve
efficiency by 70-80%? There is really only one way to go.
Most of the times
it’s not about the data itself, but about the insight that it provides
and the impact it can have on your business. The old legacy systems hide from
us what Big Data can unravel with simple logic. Start by selecting the right tools and techniques which will best handle the data for
your specific goals, time-frame and architecture.
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