Creating Global Shared Services: Sourcing Lessons from Reuters

In this final chapter of a book about sourcing options we examine an approach that is often mooted, and quite often practised, but remains very under-researched. Sometimes shared services is considered as an advanced, more efficient way of retaining IT and other back-office functions in-house. On other occasions, we have seen it used as a half-way house toward potential commercialization, or to outsourcing — following the oft-quoted advice of getting your own house in order before outsourcing, and not outsourcing problems and the “low lying fruit” (i.e., easily reduced costs) (Lacity and Willcocks, 2001, 2009). Creating shared services requires a coordinated integration of four change programs: business process redesign, organizational redesign, technology enablement, and sourcing redesign. If managed properly — shared services reduce costs, improve services, and can even generate revenues. However, surveys show that many executives fail to achieve the promised results. In this last chapter, we present the lessons Reuters learned during a five-year journey to create global shared services within their finance organization. Lessons address the right transformation approach, how to identify processes for shared services by analyzing the costs, attributes and readiness of process activities, and getting business unit clients and internal staff to cooperate and embrace the shared services initiative.