Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> A drive for an elevator in an earthmoving machine which includes an hydraulic motor, flywheel and reduction gear train mounted in a separate housing which is pivoted for rocking movement about the elevator drive shaft and which includes a spring between the housing and the frame of the vehicle to permit limited rocking in the face of reaction torque when shock loads are encountered by the elevator. <s> BIB001 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> Preface. 1 Overview. 2 The Corporation. 3 Shared Business Unit. 4 Process. 5 Technology. 6 Evaluation. 7 Economics. 8 Getting There. Further Reading. Glossary. Index. <s> BIB002 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> In recent years enterprise integration has become an important theme in information systems research and practice. Enterprise integration pervades enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer resource management (CRM) systems and applications. However, much IS research in this area seems to assume that enterprise integration is inevitable and that enterprise integration is strategically necessary. These assumptions appear to have held sway until now, probably because most IS researchers have studied the life cycle of just one single enterprise systems project. Our research throws into question these assumptions. Using critical ethnography, we studied a small-tomedium sized company within the context of a large conglomerate over a seven-year period in total, from mid 1996 to early 2004. This company was one of many subsidiaries within a large conglomerate in the AsiaPacific region (one of the global 500 companies with annual revenues of more than US$4 billion). Looking at the broader context (the conglomerate as a whole), and seen over a sufficiently long time scale, our findings suggest that enterprise integration is not inevitable, nor is it always strategically necessary. Rather, enterprise integration is perhaps best described as a cycle: as one or more cycles of integration, disintegration, and (perhaps) reintegration. This paper can be seen as one response to the call for more empirical in-depth case studies concerning enterprise systems. <s> BIB003 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> Governments are seeking ways to improve the service provisioning to their citizens by using the Internet, whilst at the same time reducing the operational costs in their back-office and IT. The implementation of shared service centers is claimed to be a valuable organizational redesign that will lead to less redundancy in operations, less staff and more concentrated knowledge accumulation. However, the decision making and subsequent implementation is a complex task full of risks on failure. This is partly due to migration of legacy IT systems, but diverse expectations and interests among the actors involved appear to be most decisive. Triggered by the failure of P-Direct, a major shared service center for HRM within the Dutch central government, this paper discusses the risks involved and the dilemma's one faces in design and implementation of shared service centers. There are various scenarios one can think of for decision-making and implementation, that lie in the spectrum from central top-down steering to bottom-up emergent process growth. The authors propose a framework for strategic choice that may guide in the search for a successful implementation strategy, and that may help future empirical research in developing "best practices". <s> BIB004 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> Technological enablers such as interorganizational information systems (IOS) and business strategies such as supply chain management or virtual organizations facilitate the diffusion of business networks. The efficiency of joining and switching networks becomes an important competitive necessity and has been referred to as an organization’s networkability. Several researchers have already suggested performance measures which assess a company’s networking abilities regarding information systems, processes, people and the like. This perspective focuses on a specific organization and does not consider that networks might also differ in their abilities to integrate new partners. Business network performance has been introduced to address network processes and their characteristics. The following research aims to gather more evidence that supports the notion of a network’s networkability and which adds to the measurement of performance on the network level. Based on a survey of the relevant literature a framework for researching the relationship between organizational and network networkability is proposed and applied in two case examples, one being a network from the finance industry and the other a network from the computer retail industry. <s> BIB005 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> In today’s increasingly competitive environment, there is constant pressure for corporate leaders to add value to their organizations. These contemporary organizations are increasingly moving into business models that attempt to reduce duplicate supporting processes and staff by streamlining business processes that are not central to the organization’s operations and concentrating on strategies on strategic or core, business processes. This concept, known as Shared Services, attempts to bundle some of the supporting processes and non-strategic activities into a separate organization, which in turn treats those processes and activities as the core of its own business. Shared Services consolidate and support redundant functions, such as accounts payable and procurement, for disparate business units. By leveraging economies of scale from a common IT infrastructure, such a group is able to market specific services to business units. Many organizations are employing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, for example SAP, to facilitate Shared Service initiatives by aggregating backroom functionality across departments. This research-in-progress paper investigates issues and problems with ERP enabled Shared Services in 19 organizations. The results reveal five main issues that organizations face in implementing a Shared Services initiative. <s> BIB006 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> Organisations are increasingly looking to realise the benefits of shared services yet there is little guidance available as to the best way to proceed. A framework is presented that considers the service provided, the design of the shared services centre and the organisational context it sits within. Case studies that examine the relevance of that framework and assess the performance of eleven shared services as a first step in determining what specific attributes of each dimension are important and how they should be aligned. It is concluded that there appears to be a single, broadly standard pattern of attributes for successful Shared Services Centres (SSCs). As fundamentals the SSC should aim to realise economies of scale by providing a broad range of transaction processing services using a standardised IT platform. Additional factors associated with successful SSCs include the SSC being held accountable for its results and there being an emphasis on managing the cultural change associated with the introduction of shared services. Beyond these core attributes a number of characteristics that potentially inhibit or facilitate the successful operation of SSCs have also been identified. <s> BIB007 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> Aggregating demand may provide a route to realizing many of the benefits of outsourcing for those organizations too small to embrace it alone. Case studies of four joint service providers (JSPs) in the Australian public sector however highlight how the providers’ organizational and environmental context can influence success. Key differences that distinguish the more successful JSPs appear to relate to them having a greater focus on how to realize the promise of economies of scale and the capabilities and freedom to deliver – through process improvement, standardization and managing the required process of change in particular. <s> BIB008 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> As businesses reconfigure their value chains and scale up their global expansions, they have to cope with a myriad of complex IT management challenges. This research examines how enterprises realign their global IT strategies for scale, speed, and innovation. Anchored in the IT governance literature, we seek to unravel the required governance structures and processes in balancing the inherent global-local tensions. Through field interviews with CIOs of global enterprises with established Asian presence, we derived a research framework for global IT management. Our findings suggest evolving global-regional-local structural elements in global IT organization supplemented by the institution of horizontal/linking mechanisms. Specifically, the key tension points appear to be in the flexible design of IT service delivery, the facilitation of IT innovation flow, and the nurturing of a global IT management mindset. <s> BIB009 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> I. INTRODUCTION <s> This paper develops a long-term, multi-project model of factors affecting organizational benefits from enterprise systems (ES), then reports a preliminary test of the model. In the shorter-term half of the model, it is hypothesized that once a system has gone live, two factors, namely functional fit and overcoming organizational inertia, drive organizational benefits flowing from each major ES improvement project. The importance of these factors may vary from project to project. In the long-term half of the model, it is hypothesized that four additional factors, namely integration, process optimization, improved access to information, and on-going major ES business improvement projects, drive organizational benefits from ES over the long term. Preliminary tests of the model were conducted using data from 126 customer presentations from SAP's 2003 and 2005 Sapphire U.S. conferences. All six factors were found to be important in explaining variance in organizational benefits from enterprise systems from the perspective of senior management. <s> BIB010
Competitive challenges require organizations to innovate customer offerings, improve business processes, and operate at lower costs. Managers are looking to 'shared services' as one means of improving organizational performance BIB004 . Shared services have become increasingly prevalent during the past decade in both private and public sectors [e.g., BIB007 BIB008 . Essentially, shared services entails the consolidation of replicate business functions; predominantly support functions like Finance, Human Resources (HR) or Information Technology (IT), in a separate unit that thereafter provides customer oriented services to the originating business units [e.g., BIB002  . The Information Systems (IS) discipline is an important domain of shared services interest, first because the IS function is amenable to the shared services organizational arrangement, and second because IS is an important enabler of shared services in other functional areas (e.g., Finance, HR) through IS infrastructure and applications. The concept of shared services has evolved over more than three decades, commencing in the 1970's in the banking sector BIB005 . Software vendor 'Real-Time Center' reports on the development of a core banking system (IBIS) implemented cooperatively by several Swiss banks BIB005 . In the 1980s most organizations implementing shared services, did so within the Finance area [e.g.,  Rupp, 2004, Walsh et al., 2008] . General Electric is recognized as one of the first large-scale shared services adopters, when in 1984 they implemented shared financial and accounting services across all companies. Digital Equipment Corporation followed in 1985, sharing financial services across their divisions and subsidiaries Fox, 2008, Ulbrich, 2006] . Later that decade, Baxter Healthcare and A.T. Kearny commenced implementing shared services for Accounting and Finance and other functions   . In the 1990's, the scope of shared services evolved beyond individual functional areas towards consolidation of the full back-office, including HR, Finance, Procurement and IT. Examples of such broader implementations are Proctor & Gamble and Solteria. Proctor & Gamble created a Global Business Services group in 1999 by combining HR, Finance, Facilities, and IT BIB009 . Solteria created a shared services project named "Jigsaw" in 1999 that encompassed IT, HR, Accounting, and other functions such as supply chain, procurement, and customer relationship management BIB003 . Towards 2000, organizations began using shared services for managing and operating ERP systems, such as SAP [Leknes and Munkvold, 2006] , PeopleSoft and Oracle BIB006 . For example, Aker Kvaerner, a global contractor of engineering services, implemented SAP via shared services to rationalize its application portfolio across different companies [Leknes and Munkvold, 2006] . Shared services have been extensively discussed in the commercial press, citing benefits such as "efficiency, value generation, costs savings and improved service for the internal customers of the parent corporation" BIB002 . Industry reports show that as at 2000, 16 of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies used shared services centers BIB001 . A report from Ferrarini [2000] states "… Nearly half of the Fortune 500 have set up shared services organizations, primarily to support financial transactions, followed by human resources and IT activities…" There are many shared services success stories such as General Electric  , Digital Equipment Corporation  ], Reuters Asia [Business Intelligence, 2005  and Allianz [Lodestone, n. d] . Leading research firms such as Gartner, provide a range of reports that describe the application of shared services in different industries, for example, one such report stating that "Many enterprises are looking to shared services to support efficiency goals and to enhance business integration and agility"  . Deloitte argues that shared services are strategic enablers as well as an administrative supporters, illustrating that though cost reduction may be the most prominent priority, shared services can also deliver many other benefits; such as to facilitate enterprise growth, improve business focus, and enhance talent management, among other strategic pursuits  . Information Systems have dual relevance to shared services; as a core function amenable to the shared services arrangement, and as a key enabler of shared services across other functions. Though not as widespread as in Finance or HR, the adoption of shared services for the IS function is growing rapidly Fox, 2008, Peters and  . "Successful management of IS shared services was recently listed as one of the seven habits of effective CIOs"  . As this trend continues, it is incumbent upon CIOs and IS professionals to better understand the potential from shared services  . Additionally, IS applications and infrastructure are both a driver and enabler of shared services across functional areas (e.g., in Finance, HR, etc.). Volume 22 As computer-based corporate information systems have become de facto and the internet pervasive and increasingly the backbone of administrative systems, the technical impediments to sharing have come down dramatically. Moreover, shared services has the potential to leverage IT related benefits with respect to faster, more accurate process coordination and execution and greater accuracy of and visibility into organizational data BIB010 . In addition, shared services can also require (radical) change to the IS applications and infrastructure, for example combining corporate-wide standardization with business unit specific customization. IS can also, either internally or through an external service provider, play a major role in transitioning to a shared services environment and its ongoing operation and evolution.