Creating outsourced shared services arrangements: Lessons from the public sector

Ronan McIvor, Martin McCracken and Marie McHugh

European Management Journal, 2011, vol. 29, issue 6, 448-461

Abstract: Shared services arrangements have been viewed as a strategy for achieving efficiencies and improved service in back-office functions such as finance and accounting, human resource, and procurement. Organisations have been increasingly turning to vendors to implement and manage outsourced shared services arrangements. Analysing the experiences of a public sector organisation, this paper provides a detailed understanding of the issues involved in creating outsourced shared services arrangements. The findings have the highlighted the importance of strong governance to drive standardisation and performance improvement, and relationship building both internally with the staff affected by the changes and externally with vendors. Failure to implement a standardised approach will hinder an organisation from fully leveraging the specialist capabilities of external vendors.

Keywords: Outsourcing; Shared services; Change management; Relational contracting; Process redesign (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0263237311000399
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eurman:v:29:y:2011:i:6:p:448-461

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/115/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/115/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2011.06.001

Access Statistics for this article

European Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Haenlein

More articles in European Management Journal from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().