Shared service partnerships

Focusing on outcomes

Many organisations have created shared service models to deliver central services such as IT, HR, finance and facilities management. The typical experience is mixed: it’s easy to take cost out in the early days by centralising resources, producing a standardised catalogue of services, and requiring customer business units to use self-service systems wherever possible. Yet after a year or two, customer satisfaction drops, and costs creep back as business units who don’t want the standard service start to employ their own specialists again.

Socia is helping organisations create the second generation of shared services, moving beyond the simple customer-supplier model to one based on long-term partnership. The aim is to move the conversations between shared service business partners and their clients from transactional to the strategic by building understanding on all sides about the needs and capabilities of their partners.

Shared service relationships that are not founded on trust or shared vision will rarely move beyond traditional customer/supplier relationships. These fail to create the flexibility, shared risk and innovation required to deliver the real objectives of internal partnerships

Socia helps clients develop the necessary governance structures, processes and measurement frameworks to make shared service relationships work, and we can also help to recruit and train people in business partner roles to sustain the benefits of the shared service model.

Our clients in this area include organisations operating shared service models for:

• IT
• Finance
• HR
• Facilities Management.