Shared Services: Mining for Corporate Gold

Rating:
Summary: Moving Internal Services to a Market Economy
Review: Moving Internal Services from Soviet-Style Monopoly to a Market System

This book is an excellent introduction to the implementation of shared services by people with lots of pragmatic experience. It's required reading at my company.

If you are just starting out, it provides a good map of what shared services are and how to go about implementing. If you have done it, it might remind you of the original vision.

Also, the book is well written, making it easy and enjoyable to read--which means that I actually read it instead of leaving it on the table hoping for osmosis to kick in.

As someone involved the creation of software to automate and support shared services at Newscale, I found the focus on "running Shared Services as business" (and all that implies) the clearest difference between the new way and the old way.

This means, frankly, that while cutting costs is the primary driver for shared services, the path has to take account five elements that are non-obvious today: 1) how do I plan and execute my service workflows, 2) how do I enable my internal customers to procure my offers and those of outsourcers? 3) how do I manage the business relationship with the business units, 4)how do I charge for services and manage the Shared Services business unit), 5) how do I design and create my service "products"?

In other words, run a business that produces value for customers at a profit -- just like a market economy. Which sounds obvious and simple, but it's not. Just ask the Russians...or the dotcoms.