Shared Services and the True Cost of IT

by Barbara Quinn

Originally led by the finance area, companies started moving toward shared services during the mid-1980s. High-performing organizations began to pay attention to their general and administrative (G&A) costs and pursued the idea of sharing services with a group of companies or business units, such as accounts payable and receivable, payroll, and general ledger. At the time, it was common for a multinational company to have multiple payroll systems in each country despite the fact that payroll systems are a common process. With the advent of enterprise-wide systems, technology helped cement the shared-services movement by providing companies the opportunity to adopt single, best-in-class processes within a single platform.

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Shared Services and the True Cost of IT 20 October 2004