Maximizing the Value of Public Sector Shared Services

Governments around the globe have been fighting a common battle on three fronts.

On the first, a global downturn in the economy has led to increased fiscal pressures and difficulties in balancing budgets.

On the second, growing expectations that public-sector organizations need to be more accountable to stakeholders and deliver better public services have left governments struggling to provide more citizen-focused services with less funding.

On the third, impending labor shortages as an aging workforce retires means many governments will find it difficult to retain the knowledge workers needed to run their operations.

In this study, we show how the drive toward high-performance government can be supported through implementing shared services.

In short, governments have the challenge of needing to accomplish seemingly endless objectives with decidedly limited resources. The traditional options for governments faced with such a dilemma have been either to cut services or increase revenue through higher taxes. Still, some government leaders have overcome these obstacles and achieved remarkable results through a different approach, dramatically increasing the value of the services they provide and transforming their organizations into high performers.

In this study, Driving High Performance in Government: Maximizing the Value of Public-Sector Shared Services, we aim to show how the drive toward high-performance government can be supported through implementing shared services. Shared services helps governments be more client-centered, outcome-oriented and accountable, by allowing governments to focus on their core responsibilities and to operate more efficiently.

Ultimately, shared services can increase public-sector value—the return government gets on its investments—by decreasing administrative costs by up to 25 percent and freeing up human resources to be redirected to citizenfacing front-office programs. When used correctly, shared services can be an engine of high performance, delivering significant cost reductions and dramatic service improvements, both of which result in improved value.

Accenture believes in the benefits shared services can deliver and in its pivotal role in transforming the delivery of administrative services in the public sector. However, our research has shown us that even governments that have implemented or are implementing shared services have many opportunities for improvement.

Shared services is a long journey, and governments are clearly in the early stages of that journey. Realizing the full value of shared services comes from focusing and implementing both service management and continuous improvement as well as cost reduction. And so we offer this report—a baseline for governments to see what their peers are doing, leading practices uncovered from the research and our own advice based on extensive experience. Our hope is that we will begin to fill in the gaps in knowledge on a topic so critical to achieving high performance in government.

Four key findings emerged from our research:

• Governments regard shared services as a vital tool for meeting their challenges.
  
  
• Most governments in-source their own shared services center although many rely on outside expertise during planning.
  
  
• The unique nature of governments sets up some very specific challenges to shared services.
  
  
• Many governments have started to implement some key components of a true shared services operating model, but few have implemented them all; thus, few have achieved the full potential of their shared services.
  
  

We discuss each of these findings in greater detail in the full report.

Public-sector organizations that have already started to adopt shared services now need to move to the next step in the journey—maximizing the benefits they get from shared services.

For them, benchmarking their shared services operations is the right next step in developing a strategy for optimization. For those governments that have not yet begun, we hope this report will convince them of the need to start on the path. Shared services is no longer an unproven concept in government, and there are successful examples and models in the public sector for them to emulate and learn from.

Shared services is not easy, but, as our research has found, it is well worth the effort. The leaders of shared services are already achieving stunning results in terms of cost savings, strategic benefits and improvements in the speed and quality of service, all of which translate into greater public-sector value. Their successes to date seem to make one point very clear: If you are not already thinking about moving to shared services for your organization, you probably should be.

More

• Shared Services Research & Insights
• Cross-Jurisdiction Collaboration
• The 2011 Public Sector and Education Shared Services Summit