Strategic Mistakes in Implementing Government Shared Services
1Make it about the model and its superiority over traditional models for delivering support services. When you make it about the organization or the people not the model you inadvertently create ill will that the shared services organization must overcome in future.
2Tag and bag the savings derived from implementing shared services. Create a creditable costs and service baseline and capture then consciously redirect the savings that shared savings generate. Failure to do so impugns the creditability of the model and can result in a situation in which an agency is spending more on adminjistrative support services after implementing shared services than before.
Implementing Government Shared Services
Implementing shared services in the public sector is more difficult but more rewarding than implementing shared servicews in the private sector. It is more difficult because of the unique attributes of government organizations and the environment in which they operate.
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Government managers and the organizations they manage are risk adverse by nature and implementing a new business model, even a no brainer like shared services, would be considered a risk.
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Political appointees have a shelf life of 3 to 4 years. They are not inclined to take on long term projects or initiatives that may benefit them in the short term but will also benefit their precdeccessors. True.
Reigning in the Federal Deficit
A storm is brewing around recent initiatives to reduce the federal deficit (Federal Times, January 20, 2011 ) Freezing federal pay and trimming the federal work force may reduce the cost of government but critics say that the impact will be deminimus and that there is more of political postering than there is strategy at work. I agree that absent a long term strategy for reducing the cost of government the impact of the salary freeze will be negligible at best. We need a more efficient business model for delivering administrative support services. By support services I mean back room services common to all agencies like employee payroll, accounts payable, employee travel, IT and HR. These are services that are invisible to citizens except as they impact the cost of government. With a better business model we can reduce the size and cost of government where it will least impact citizens.
New Year’s Resolutions for a Government Shared Services Center
New Year’s Resolutions for your shared services center
I put together a list of New Year’s resolutions for your shared services center. These are ideas or initiatives that shared services center executives overlook or are too busy to attend to. None of these are big ticket items so they are well within the budget of a government shared services center. They focus your attention on the fundamentals of service delivery and are panaceas for complacency.
1Call your customer contact center as a customer. If you run a shared services center you probably do not get service in the same way that your customers do. If you have a question about your leave and earnings statement, for example, you probably pick up the phone and call your payroll chief. What you probably do not do is call your shared services center’s 1-800 number and get in the queue. You miss an opportunity to experience your customer service interface the way your customers do. To listen to your call menu and make judgments, like your customers do, about the quality of the interface and the timeliness of the service.
Customer Service – Turning Negatives into Positives
- Over the span of just a few days I had occasion to call two government contact centers and two industry contact centers for service. Since these interactions occurred over a short period of time they provided a unique opportunity to compare and contrast government vs. industry customer contact center service. Too often government customer service centers lack knowledge of basic contact center practices and protocols and indicate an inattention to the details that make for a less than satisfactory customer experience (See If You Can’t Beat ‘Em). Here are a few examples to illustrate the point. I would allow that they are merely anecdotal if they weren’t so typical of other experiences I have had with government customer service centers through the years. Ironically, the things that would transform these experiences from negatives to positives do not cost anything to implement and would even in some cases actually save time and money. What things?
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