Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Shared services have gained significance as an organizational arrangement, in particular for support functions, to reduce costs, increase quality, and create new capabilities. The information systems (IS) function is amenable to sharing arrangements and information systems can enable sharing in other functional areas. However, despite being a promising area for IS research, literature on shared services in the IS discipline is scarce and scattered. There is still little consensus on what shared services is. Moreover, a thorough understanding of why shared services are adopted, who are involved, and how things are shared is lacking. 

In this article, we set out to progress IS research on shared services by establishing a common ground for future research and proposing a research agenda to shape the field based on an analysis of the IS literature. We present a holistic and inclusive definition, discuss the primacy of economic-strategic objectives so far, and introduce conceptual frameworks for stakeholders and the notion of sharing. We also provide an overview of the theories and research methods applied. We propose a research agenda that addresses fundamental issues related to objectives, stakeholders, and the notion of sharing to lay the foundation for taking IS research on shared services forward.

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One-Stop Government Portals: Transformation or Navigation

E-government is seen as a promising approach for governments to improve their service towards citizens and become more cost-efficient in service delivery. This is often combined with one-stop government, which is a citizen-oriented approach stressing integrated provision of services from multiple departments via a single access point, the one-stop government portal. While the portal concept is gaining prominence in practice, there is little known about its status in academic literature. This hinders academics in building an accumulated body of knowledge around the concept and makes it hard for practitioners to access relevant academic insights on the topic. The objective of this study is to identify and understand the key themes of the one-stop government portal concept in academic, e-government research. A holistic analysis is provided by addressing different viewpoints: social-political, legal, organizational, user, security, service, data and information, and technical. As an overall finding, the authors conclude that there are two different approaches: a more pragmatic approach focuses on quick wins in particular related to usability and navigation and a more ambitious, transformational approach having far reaching social-political, legal, and organizational implications.

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Understanding Shared Services : An exploration of the IS literature

In a competitive environment, companies continuously innovate to offer superior services at lower costs. ‘Shared services’ have been extensively adopted in practice as one means for improving organisational performance.

Shared services is considered most appropriate for support functions, and is widely adopted in Human Resource Management, Finance and Accounting; more recently being employed across the Information Systems function. IS applications and infrastructure are an important enabler and driver of shared services in all functional areas. 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.

As this trend continues, CIOs and IT professionals will need a deeper understanding of the shared services phenomenon and its implications. The advent of shared services has consequential implications for the IS academic discipline. Yet, archival analysis of IS the academic literature reveals that shared services, though mentioned in more than 100 articles, has received little in depth attention.

This paper is the first attempt to investigate and report on the current status of shared services in the IS literature. The paper presents detailed review of literature from main IS journals and conferences, findings evidencing a lack of focus and definitions and objectives lacking conceptual rigour. The paper concludes with a tentative operational definition, a list of perceived main objectives of shared services, and an agenda for related future research.

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Business models for shared services

During my work, I have become more and more involved with shared services. Given my focus on business models, my interest is in understanding the business logic behind shared services.

Firstly, we have to address what we mean with shared services. Shared services can be defined as “The concentration of company resources performing like activities, typically spread across the organization, in order to service multiple internal partners at lower cost and with higher service levels, with the common goal of delighting external customers and enhancing corporate value” (Schulman et al., 1999).

An initial orientation on the business model of shared services has brought me to two core considerations for service provisioning in organizations. The first consideration is related to the centralization/decentralisation discussion that is quite common in organizational literature, for example in relation to the IT function. The preliminary proposition is that shared services combine the benefits of both approaches while circumventing the disbenefits, see the following link for a nice example.

The second consideration is the hierarchy/market discussion that is quite common in economic literature. An alternative for this is the insourcing/outsourcing (make-or-buy) discussion found in supply chain and purchasing literature. The preliminary proposition here is that shared services provide control (and internal capabilities) on the one hand and the discipline of the market (and a customer focus) on the other.

Note that, while we start with the optimistic mindset that shared services can provide us with the 'best-of-both worlds,' there is also the risk of 'worst-of both-worlds.' This provides the starting-point for research into how shared services can live up to its promises?