The Evolving Shared Services Model
30 June - 1 Jul 2021
Milan, Italy- Hosted by SDA Bocconi
The idea of global business services shared within a company has been around and in vogue for some 15-20 years now. It has matured as an operational support philosophy, moving from disparate support services to shared services by corporate function to, in some cases, true globally shared business services combining a number of functions. This roundtable will address how this is working, how far various corporations have gone along this journey, and why. We will discuss how you operate now and plan to in the future. Many circumstances have changed in the intervening years, perhaps the most dramatic of which are the trends associate with digital transformation, including the growing importance of data, of customer experiences, and of “anything as a service”. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated this transition to digital. At the same time, however, there are other impulses at work. For many years globalization was in the ascendancy, and now it appears to be at least in a pause if not a retreat, with elements of nationalism on the rise. Various data protection regimes have come into effect across the globe, impacting how companies can operate. The pandemic has raised questions about global supply-chain reliability. These trends, along with the experiences of the last 15-20 years in shared services, make this a good time to reexamine where we are on this and how we plan to move forward.