Shared Pain

Computerworld - After two years of flying solo, Houston-based Shell Services International (SSI), which offers shared services for IT, human resources and business consulting to other firms, is going back to being an internal shared services organization at Royal Dutch/Shell Group.
The reason for the switch? Because the oil and gas company's business units said "they weren't getting the attention they needed," says Dennis Wymore, SSI's manager of shared services consulting. "They wanted us to emphasize their needs more than those separate from the company. A shared services [unit] can't have one foot in two worlds, each with different market requirements."
SSI isn't alone in wrestling with shared services challenges. According to Dean Davison, an analyst at Meta Group Inc. in Los Angeles, IT shared services groups typically have to contend with many thorny issues, including the need to get internal IT staffers to understand how to price services, how to provide them and how to communicate their value to business units.
IT shared services groups are separate, accountable organizations set up to consolidate and market functions such as infrastructure or applications development uniformly to all business units. They must focus on meeting the business units' needs while at the same time recovering their costs through chargebacks to the business units.
Two exceptions to this industrywide conundrum are the IT shared services units at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in New York. The two service groups have successfully carried out programs and procedures to meet the needs of the $20 billion pharmaceutical firm's business.
Information Management (IM) Shared Services oversees Bristol-Myers' entire IT infrastructure, including 42,000 desktops, six global data centers, 2,000 production applications and a wide-area network. The Enterprise Systems and Processes group oversees the worldwide SAP enterprise resource planning system for the company's financial and manufacturing divisions.
Outsourcing Analysis
Conducting routine outsourcing analysis has helped IM Shared Services evaluate the market competitiveness of its internal services. Early last year, IM Shared Services participated in an outsourcing bid with eight other third-party services firms to support more than 23,000 of Bristol-Myers' North American desktops.
With Bristol-Myers' chief financial officer's support, the contract was awarded to IM Shared Services' internal desktop group, which hired a third party to service hardware.
"We offered a lower cost and guaranteed a higher level of service than the third-party bids. All of the business unit chief financial officers were kept informed during the bidding process," says Susan O'Day, vice president of IM Shared Services, who declined to comment on the value of the deal.
Benchmarking and meeting service