Integrated Business Services: Taking Shared Services to New Heights of High Performance

Shared services organizations have been playing a considerable role in helping private and even public sector organizations reduce costs and gain the benefits of standardization.

New business imperatives, however, are demanding the evolution of shared services organizations into integrated business services (IBS) organizations that play a more strategic role as true enablers of high performance.

Accenture looks at the drivers of change in shared services and explores the characteristics of the emerging IBS organization.

The shift of economic power from West to East and the proliferation of affordable high-speed technologies are dramatically changing the world, and businesses and governments must quickly transform their operating models to keep up with the needs of their new and existing customers and citizens.

As the backbone of these private and public sector organizations, the shared services organization must now evolve as well if it is to enable enterprise-wide transformation.

Overall, the objectives of shared services organizations have not changed. But as shared services has become increasingly important to the enterprise, a sense of urgency has arisen around a number of specific goals.

These include:

• Delivering upon continuous improvement, service enhancement and cost-reduction targets.
  
  
• Enabling growth in existing and emerging markets without traditional investments in new facilities, new infrastructure and new people.
  
  
• Getting closer to the customers to provide the services they demand and truly value.
  
  
• Providing accurate and actionable information in real time.
  
  
• Innovating new services and solutions to enhance focus and growth.
  
  
• Attracting and retaining top talent.

These demands put shared services organizations in a somewhat uncomfortable position. On the one hand, they hear calls for more globalization and standardization to deliver improvements; on the other, they are asked for more localization and even a small degree of customization to deliver market and customer intimacy.

Expectations that they will deliver cost reductions as they have in the past are becoming more difficult to meet: many shared services organizations have already made their processes lean and have largely exhausted wage arbitrage opportunities. Finally, organizations have become accustomed to equating shared services business cases with bottom-line cost savings, even though future evolution of shared services will likely require investments to improve quality, timeliness and scalability, and to enable top-line growth.

To meet the challenges, more mature shared services organizations have evolved into IBS organizations, which go beyond the traditional function-based service provision of earlier generations. They are organized instead around delivery of services in a much more complete sense—ideally, from end-to-end—and correspondingly provide the gamut from typical to value-add services. Moreover, an IBS organization’s broader purview helps it to continuously identify, innovate and implement new services and solutions that support enterprise growth at scale.

While shared services may have reached its limits in its traditional form, it has not fulfilled all of its potential to enable high performance. As shared services continues to mature, those looking for new levels of business value will boldly cross the expanse to shared services’ next major phase of evolution—IBS.

Implementing IBS is no small task. However, those that do will broaden their horizons, pushing their IBS organizations to manage and deliver value-add services on an enterprise-wide basis and elevating the IBS organization to its rightful place as a true partner to the operating units.

IBS organizations share a number of common characteristics:

• Strategic elevation. IBS organizations operate as independent, high-functioning businesses with C-level leadership.
  
  
• Service value. IBS organizations deliver broad service value by proactively identifying and shaping innovative new capabilities.
  
  
• Global flexibility. IBS organizations leverage a global footprint, global talent pools, collaboration technologies and detailed standards blueprints to support enterprise growth.
  
  
• Sourcing agility. IBS organizations engage business partners to deliver high-quality, market-competitive services. They make good use of tiered service delivery models, with a mix of captive centers and strategic partners.
  
  
• Process excellence. IBS organizations execute global standard end-to-end processes with shared accountability. They make use of common enabling technologies to reduce process complexity and have global process owners in place to improve processes and monitor compliance continuously.
  
  
• Service excellence. IBS organizations simplify the customer experience at all levels of the customer organization, from the end users of the services up to the top-level management teams. The simplified, one-stop-service-based nature of IBS allows customers to resolve business issues without having to navigate the organizational complexities of a traditional multi-function shared services model.