Share services to save costs and form partnerships

By sharing services, UK universities and colleges can save costs, increase efficiency, share knowledge and form strategic partnerships to develop cross-institution support services. They also satisfy the government’s shared services agenda.

What is a shared service?

A shared service differs from outsourcing to a contractor in that it requires a formal framework and additional governance. The advantage of a shared service is that users play a much stronger part in determining how it is developed and delivered.

What you can do

Consider the advantages

A first step is to understand where shared services may offer genuine benefit and strategic advantage. Our guide can help you make this assessment taking an ‘enterprise architecture’ approach.

Review your business processes

It’s essential to review and re-engineer your business processes before deciding whether to share or outsource. Failure to understand the importance of good process design and good workflow is the main reason why so many shared service initiatives fail to deliver the expected benefits.

Assessing your current services

You will need to know the cost of existing services and the benefits they deliver before deciding whether a shared service or outsourcing represents value for money. Our costing technology and services guide can help you with this valuation.

Case studies

We’ve produced a series of case studies to illustrate how different organisations have approached shared services.

The University of Plymouth and Plymouth City Council HELASS Project developed a useful approach for identifying many possibilities for sharing services and selecting the best two.

North Hertfordshire College, managed to reduce the cost of its finance processes by 30% in a six-month period after first reviewing its business processes, removing the need to outsource or develop a shared service.