Government
agencies are attempting to adopt a shared services mentality, but to be
successful agencies will have to overcome significant challenges.
Shared services involve the bringing together of functionality between
multiple, largely autonomous entities. They generate benefits through
using a single group to provide a service to multiple agencies or
units, rather than requiring each agency to provide the service on its
own. Benefits accrue from aggregated economies of scale and the ability
to adopt standardized business processes. The need for this
transformation is usually driven by the need to relieve financial
pressures facing agencies or to take advantage of the opportunity to
deliver multi-agency functionality and attempt to realize savings from
e-government initiatives.
RGS believes that to be effective using the shared services model in
government, the sharing agencies must feel that they retain partial
ownership as opposed to outsourcing. RGS believes this is a change
management issue, not a technology or business issue. Anyone looking at
a typical candidate function for shared services can see the business
benefit and the technology to implement a shared service is common
place. The challenge is to address the barriers to change in a way that
facilitates success and gets the organization to the new model with
minimal resistance. |
