The concept of Shared Services certainly isn’t a new one. It’s been a popular business structure since the 1980’s. But, even now in 2017, the number of organizations transitioning to a Shared Services model continues to rise. Why? Because the model makes simple, economic sense. If you centralize administrative functions and share them between business units, you will standardize processes, eliminate redundancies and ultimately reduce costs. Sounds easy, right?
Transitioning to a Shared Services model is one of the most common transformational changes we see in our Change Management Consulting work. The rationale for this type of enterprise-wide change is clear-- why support redundant services such as IT, Human Resources, Financial and/or Legal, in each organizational silo when there can be one corporate-wide resource that is shared? But… the question is… are organizations achieving true benefit realization from their Shared Services implementations?
So many organizations are moving toward a Shared Services model. The business case for this type of transformational change is undeniably strong. Shared Services consolidates redundant business units used by multiple parts of the organization. When complete, this type of enterprise-wide change has been proven to reduce costs and increase efficiencies.
