What did Your Shared Service Programme Actually Change?

Global Business Services brings functions together. The harder question is what the business can actually do more easily once they are there.

Ashley: They can all have the same boss and still be trying to achieve different things.

Las Vegas was a day away. We were heading to ServiceNow Knowledge and had allowed ourselves some time to get there.

Keyvan: But putting those functions under one person ought to help. The business wants to grow across several regions without its support costs growing at the same rate. It has brought HR, finance, procurement and IT together. Yet every new initiative still seems to require a separate negotiation with each of them.

Ashley: What has the business actually asked the person running shared services to achieve?

Keyvan: Better service. Lower cost. Fewer people doing the same thing in different places.

Ashley: Okay. Take a real piece of work. The business wants to open another office. What changes in HR, procurement, finance and IT? Who makes sure those things happen together and in the right order?

I had done some reading before we left. Global Business Services, GBS, brings functions together with shared resources and responsibility for services that cross departmental boundaries. I had paid rather more attention to the consolidation.

There is something reassuring about an organisation chart with fewer boxes. My simple brain sees fewer boxes and immediately assumes progress has been made. You can point at it. Someone has a title. The boxes had moved. I was less sure the floor underneath the work had.

Keyvan: Give me something small enough to picture.

Ashley: I've seen this in a global law firm. Different offices each had their own purchasing arrangements and their own way of recording equipment. Locally, it worked. Then the central team wanted to know what could be reused elsewhere, or what it would take to support another office. That was when people started going around the regions trying to reconcile different answers.

Keyvan: We have been through this with Ray in Valencia. Asset management. Put the records together properly.

Ashley: That helps. But who had agreed what every office was supposed to record in the first place, and why? IT had a part in it. So did procurement, finance and the regional leaders deciding what their people spent time on.

A lorry ahead of us was grinding its way up another long climb through the Rockies. Ashley eased off. I could see how easily I had turned the problem into a data exercise. A common record. A common system. Something with a reasonably clear beginning and end.

Keyvan: So we standardise. Everyone buys the same thing, records it the same way.

Ashley: Some of it, yes. There may be good reasons to buy different equipment locally. Start with what the business needs from the service. Then work out what has to be consistent.

I thought about the person waiting for the equipment.

Keyvan: So procurement can get the price down, follow every approval, and the person waiting for the kit can still miss the date they promised a customer.

Somewhere, those expectations had to meet. Ashley brought up the familiar story of the NASA janitor.

Ashley: He was asked what he was doing and said he was helping put a man on the Moon. He could explain how his work connected to what NASA was there to do. Can the people running your shared services do the same?

Keyvan: I suspect most people could give you a sentence about supporting the business. We have all sat through enough presentations to know what to say.

Ashley: Then ask what they do differently because of it. What gets priority? What can wait? What happens when helping another team makes their own numbers worse?

I have a natural suspicion of conversations about everyone being aligned. Nobody attends the meeting intending to argue for misalignment. You can leave with unanimous support and discover a month later that everyone understood something slightly different.

Hackett's 2026 work describes GBS workloads growing faster than budgets while organisations are still expected to improve productivity and service. That makes these trade-offs harder to ignore.

Ashley: This is why I tend to test a service against four things. I want to know what it is doing for the business. Does it drive growth? Improve profitability? Help gain and retain customers? And does it help manage risk?

Keyvan: All right. Growth. How does procurement grow anything?

Ashley: Take a supplier you need before a customer contract can start. Procurement, legal, finance and security may all have perfectly good work to do. The question is whether those services together help you hit the date you promised the customer. If they do not, growth is being held up inside your own organisation.

Keyvan: So profitability cannot just mean procurement got the price down.

That was much clearer. Profitability had to follow the same piece of work further than one team's budget.

Ashley: Exactly. What did it cost the whole business to get the result? If one team saves money and creates more chasing, waiting or rework somewhere else, include that too. Otherwise the saving only exists in one budget.

Keyvan: The customer piece feels even further away. The people buying the equipment may never speak to one.

Ashley: They do not need to. If an internal delay stops a delivery team starting, the customer feels it. Follow the service far enough and you can see the connection. The customer does not care which internal function caused the delay.

Keyvan: Risk I understand. Some checks slow things down, but we still need them. Does every service have to hit all four?

Ashley: No. One may be mostly about risk. Another may be growth and customers. You just need to know what outcome the service is there to support, and what trade-offs the business is willing to make. If nobody has agreed that, each function will make the trade-off for itself.

A request to "join everything up" could mean almost anything. Gartner's IT Score client data, cited in How to Structure IT Like a Service Provider, suggests as many as 50% of IT organisations worldwide are moving towards a service-optimised operating model, with more than half particularly challenged by the organisational changes required. Ashley was taking the same idea beyond IT.

Keyvan: This sounds like a lot to ask of the CIO.

Ashley: The CIO can help connect it. HR still knows its obligations, finance its controls, procurement its suppliers. Those leaders have to agree what they are trying to deliver together. The CIO cannot make every functional decision for them. Then technology can carry the work between teams, apply the rules and automate the bits that are ready. The people who understand the service still decide how it should work.

We stopped to fill up. I returned with two coffees and a packet of biscuits that had looked smaller on the shelf. Ashley looked at the packet, then at me, and cleared a space between the seats.

Keyvan: Hang on. We have been talking about GBS for most of the morning. Where does enterprise service management fit?

Ashley: It is the service management discipline you apply across the business. What can someone expect? Who owns it? How does the work move between teams? How do you know it finished properly? You can use that with HR, finance, procurement and facilities just as you would with IT.

Keyvan: I would ask that person with the new title what the business can now do more easily. Can we open that office sooner? Can we support more customers? They should be able to take me through the services that make it possible, and show me where the work still gets stuck.

Global Business Services (GBS) gives you an organisational model for bringing functions together. Enterprise Service Management (ESM) applies service management beyond IT: define the service, the owner, the hand-offs and the measures, then manage it across the functions involved. The business purpose gives everyone something to organise around.

By the time we reached our stop for the night, the sun had gone from the road. Ashley parked and switched off the engine. There was one more thing bothering me.

Keyvan: We are about to spend several days talking about AI doing work across all these functions. Which version of how the business works are we going to give it?

Ashley: That is a good question to take with us.

I picked up the coffees. One was empty. The other had gone cold while I was talking. Ashley took the biscuits and we got out.

Same house. Different room.

Keyvan Shirnia is Chief Revenue Officer at Fusion GBS.

Ashley Gionnotti is the ServiceNow Technical Delivery Lead at Fusion GBS, based in London.

This blog is part of The Six Critical Capabilities series. To find out where your service management foundations actually stand, the Fusion GBS scorecard gives you a benchmarked baseline in five working days. It is the front door to Value Adoption Services: use the data to find low-maturity quick wins, link the first improvement to a business outcome, secure modest funding, implement it, measure and benchmark the value, then use the evidence to support the next step. Details at fusiongbs.com/service-management-scorecards