Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Identifying stakeholders of shared services <s> Information system software development projects suffer from a high failure rate. One of many obstacles faced by project managers is non-supportive users, those not actively sharing in development responsibilities. The coordination activity of early partnering has been proposed in the literature to promote collaboration and enhance user support. The extent of partnering is considered in a model that relates partnering to the risks of user non-support and eventual project success. The model is developed from contingency theory, with residual performance risk as an intermediary variable. A survey of IS project membership provides the data, which indicates that partnering significantly relates to higher user support, less residual risk, and better project performance. Researchers may use variations on the model to examine other barriers to success and the techniques applied to lower the barriers. Practitioners should consider applying partnering techniques to improve software development project performance. <s> BIB001 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Identifying stakeholders of shared services <s> Purpose – Driven by cost reduction and improved quality of service, some firms have adopted shared services as a governance model to manage their staff functions. This paper seeks to explore this behavior using the resource‐based view.Design/methodology/approach – The case of an information technology (IT) unit of a multinational manufacturing firm is presented to provide insight into the issues involved when adopting and migrating an IT resource system to a shared services model. The analysis is extended using conceptual models of the relevant sub‐systems developed through the soft systems methodology (SSM), using a set of root level definitions that are intended to express the transformation to a shared services model.Findings – The results suggest that the major changes involved when transitioning to shared services are process and communication related. Aligning the team members and gaining their commitment are necessary for success.Practical implications – The case analysis and SSM models provide som... <s> BIB002 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Identifying stakeholders of shared services <s> This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more “post-bureaucratic” with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously affect different stages of the evolution. <s> BIB003 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> Identifying stakeholders of shared services <s> This article analyses the demand side of business services outsourcing. Using insights from a number of bodies of literature, the article interprets business services outsourcing as corporate restructuring involving the administrative functions of the firm. Propositions are developed around the following. First, the existing corporate structure and the nature of supplier markets affect the paths chosen to create shared business services and to move to outsourcing. Second, the trajectory of the move to shared services and outsourcing affects the distribution of capabilities between users and suppliers. The study examines these propositions through a comparison of human resource outsourcing in two leading consumer products companies, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever. We find that a relatively high degree of centralization at P&G led it to create an internal shared services center before outsourcing, whilst a more decentralized Unilever utilized outsourcing as an occasion for globally standardizing its systems and processes. The article draws implications of these different paths for core capabilities. <s> BIB004
Prior research in IS as discussed in BIB001 and  , has shown the importance of properly identifying the correct stakeholders. Seeking the appropriate perspectives of the relevant stakeholders is important for research (e.g., when defining the unit of analysis, framing the research questions and deriving and executing the research design) and in practice (e.g., when gathering requirements for the implementation of shared services or when evaluating the initiatives). However, the IS literature about stakeholders in relation to shared services is very limited. There have not yet been any papers in the IS literature (our primary and secondary sets of papers) that are specifically dedicated to the topic of shared services stakeholders or have a section specifically dedicated to this topic. Here we aim to address the gap in understanding of shared services stakeholders by deriving a preliminary conceptual framework, based on a synthesized summary of references to stakeholders in the IS literature on shared services. The synthesis proceeded in multiple phases: first any mention of any type of stakeholder (a person, group or organization with an interest and/ or role in the shared services arrangements) was captured under a single main node 'Stakeholders'. This was further analyzed in a second round of analysis, where specific roles/groups were identified from the data. At the end of this stage (when extracted quotes were grouped into similar categories as indicated by the data), we sought literature on organizational stakeholders, to help further justify and confirm the observations. Table 2 presents the summary results of this analysis. Papers dedicated to stakeholders in shared services were scarce. Those that did discuss stakeholders were always in the context of a shared services centre (SSC), a semi-autonomous unit responsible for providing the shared services. The roles identified from the analysis above were grouped around those that were 'internal' -within the SSC, and those that were 'external' -outside the SSC (as depicted in Column 1 of Table 2 ). The roles, both internal and external to the SSC, identified from this analysis are depicted in Column 2 of Table 2 . Columns 3, 4 and 5 provide supporting evidence for each role, with the number of citations, number of sources and example citations. In addition to the different roles and their groupings, special attention was given to capturing key terms that indicate the relationships between these various parties (e.g., 'serves', 'is in charge of', 'interacts with'). The results of this analysis were used to derive a conceptual framework of shared services stakeholders, as graphically illustrated in "the governance model also specified global IT officers assigned to each business function" BIB002 (citizens, government, business, visitors) ." BIB003 .  ] "… Selective use of outsourcing partners would fill in gaps..."  . "By the time P&G's shared services were outsourced, their operations were drastically transformed and streamlined" BIB004  .