In the digital environment, shared services and IT will collaborate with business units to determine how best to achieve the digital transformation of end-to-end processes. Therefore, leaders should now be setting performance expectations. According to McKinsey, digitised shared-services organisations can help to invent new online services and utilise analytics models to assist in business planning.
Processes and workflows
Shared-services groups can now work with IT to specify areas where automation should be used. Some currently existing manual workflows must undergo transformation. A joint team should systematically scan all back-office activities and processes; it should then define their business purpose, system interdependencies and level of manual work involved. Some activities may be fully automated; others should not be automated at all, while a third category will see a hybrid approach involving only partial automation.
Then decisions can be made about technology investments, system architecture and operational changes. Real-time management information systems providing detailed performance metrics will be utilised by many shared-services groups.
Talent needed
The traditional model has been a pyramid structure (a few team leaders manage vast groups of processing agents, who entry data and so on). Now more people with expertise in specific processes will be needed. Technology and user-experience experts will collaborate with them.
HR will need to change its approach - for example by adding machine-learning analysts, user-experience architects and social-media strategists to the crew.
Operations and development
As new technologies emerge, the shared-services group will need to adopt them. In a digital world, the development will have to be more collaborative and highly flexible.
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