My colleague Rob Speck tells a story on his excellent new Process Maximus blog that perfectly illustrates the performance deficit in shared services, and how to address it.
It's a deficit that has been largely hidden until recently. Shared services is wildly popular, and growing across all industries and regions. In Deloitte's 2010 Global Shared Services Survey, 89% of organizations declared shared services to be 'strategic'.
But scratch the surface and it's not hard to find business cases that have failed to deliver, sometimes spectacularly. According to the Deloitte survey, 78% of organizations reported ‘no significant positive impact’ on process efficiency or quality.
In practice, promised efficiency gains have proven difficult to deliver, and sustainable improvement has been even more elusive.
Rob's story illustrates the prevailing condition of many shared services organizations. His client was the shared services division of a Fortune 100 company, providing Finance and HR services. The SSC's processes were 'managed' and 'governed' in Word and Visio and peoples' heads. Process ownership was fragmented and unclear. KPI metrics were disconnected from their business processes. Onboarding new clients to the SSC was challenging. The confusion and complexity demanded a culture of heroics. It was, the client said, in a moment of despair: 'A complete mess'.
OK perhaps this is slightly harsh, but it was, in many ways, a fairly typical SSC.
Rob's case study shows how that SSC deployed Nimbus Control to significantly up the pace of its journey towards operational excellence. At the heart of its success is an integrated management platform that provides visibility and enables effective collaboration, across a complex hybrid delivery landscape, on the continuous improvement of its end-to-end processes.
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