Shared services
In the Republic of Ireland, the health service nationally has been reorganized from a set of regional Health Boards to a unified national structure, the Health Services Executive. Within this structure there will be a National Shared Services Organisation, based on the model developed at the former Eastern Health Shared Services, where Procurement, HR, Finance and ICT services were provided to Health agencies in the Eastern Region of Ireland on a business-to business basis.
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New Trends in Shared Services
Organizations that have centralized their IT functions have now begun to take a close look at the technology services that their IT departments provide to internal customers, evaluating where it makes sense to provide specific technology components as a shared service. E-mail and scanning operations were obvious early candidates; many organizations with document-intensive operations are deploying scanning centers as a shared service.
Many large organizations, in both the public and private sectors, are now considering deploying enterprise content management (ECM) technology as a shared service.
The exponential growth in the amount of unstructured content is making ECM a priority within many organizations. Where previously content management may have been deployed to meet departmental needs, in certain niches within the organization, it is now being recognized as an enterprise-wide need: an infrastructure investment rather than a niche application. Many CIOs have concluded that if ECM functionality is to be offered to the enterprise, it makes sense to offer that functionality as a shared service, as a way of cost-effectively meeting the content management needs of large user bases, with potentially diverse requirements for various components of ECM functionality (capture,document management, workflow, etc).
In addition to cost-effectiveness, the ECM shared-service model also allows an organization to make better use of limited IT resources – particularly when many upcoming IT projects tend to require one or more components of ECM functionality.
One of the most compelling forces driving ECM shared services is the economics of addressable seat costs versus utilized seat costs. ECM remained a niche application within many organizations because organizations purchased enterprise licenses that were then underutilized. Addressable seat costs (if IT were able to deploy ECM to everyone), are likely to be relatively low. In most companies, ECM has tended to be rolled out to only a subset of the potential user base, which means that the addressable cost per user may actually be considerably higher – resulting in prohibitively high utilized costs per seat. Under these circumstances, few organizations could cost-justify enterprise deployment of ECM.
In contrast, a shared services approach to ECM allows IT to define appropriate levels of functionality for various segments of the potential user base. IT and business units work together to define various packages or tiers of ECM functionality (for example, ranging from a package with basic store-and-retrieve capabilities, to a more advanced package offering revision-control and automated workflow capabilities). A chargeback model is then associated with the various tiers. The packages can then be rolled out to the various business units using a “factory” approach. Overall, such an approach helps an organization to cost-justify an enterprise-wide investment in the technology, thereby maximizing the economies of scale.
Like other types of shared services initiatives, rolling out ECM as a shared service is a complex undertaking, presenting a number of practical challenges. Best-in-class organizations seek to involve both IT and the business units to develop a strategy for moving to a shared-services environment and for ongoing program management, once ECM shared services have been deployed.
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See also
- Portable Employer of Record
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References
- ^ Outsourcing vs. shared services | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-05-30 | By Ephraim Schwartz
- ^ Shared Services vs. Outsourcing | IT Business Edge
- ^ Capgemini U.S. | Jury Is Still Out On Outsourcing Versus Shared Services As Dominant Service Delivery Model, Says Capgemini Survey
- ^ NAO report (HC 2007-08): improving corporate functions using shared services
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External links
- Shared Services & Outsourcing Network - SSON
- Shared Services SA (South Australia)
- Shared Services integration from AppSwing for Local Authorities
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