Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/81334

Title

A preliminary decision model for shared services: insights from an Australian university context

Author(s)

Yee, Jonathan;  Tan, Felix Ter Chian;  Chan, Taizan

Abstract

Shared Services involves the convergence and streamlining of an organisation's functions to ensure timely service delivery as effectively and efficiently as possible. This would result in lower cost, improved service delivery and economies of scale. The conventional wisdom of today is that the potential for Shared Services is increasing due to the increasing costs of changing systems and business requirements and also in implementing and running information systems (IS). However many organizations opt instead for an outsourcing arrangement as the alternative towards cost savings, due in essence to a lack of realization of this potential for Shared Services. This paper rationales turning from outsourcing (to looking within organisations) to leverage on Shared Services for similar cost savings and reaping other potential benefits. The paper's objectives and contributions are three-fold: (1) distinguish between Shared Services and Outsourcing, (2) report on insights from a single Australian university case study through a transaction cost lens, and to demonstrate the potential for Shared Services and (3) develop a decision model to gauge the potential of implementing Shared Services across similar organisations.

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology

Source

Proceedings of 'Evolving boundaries and new frontiers: defining the IS discipline', the 20th Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS 2009), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 02-04 December 2009, pp. 492-502

Publication year

2009

FOR Code(s)

0806 Information Systems;  080609 Software Engineering

Keyword(s)

Case studies;  Decision models;  Higher education;  Inter-organisational shared services;  Organisational design;  Outsourcing;  Shared services;  System outsourcing;  Universities

Publisher

Australasian Association for Information Systems

ISBN

9780646525709

Publisher URL

http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/news/conferences/acis09/Proceedings/proceedings.html

Copyright

Proceedings copyright © 2009 Monash University. This paper copyright © 2009 the authors. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full in the Conference Papers and Proceedings. Those documents may be published on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, in printed form, and on mirror sites on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.

Peer reviewed