The Rise of Shared Services / SourcingMag.com, 17 May 2007
http://www.sourcingmag.com/blog/archive/the_rise_of_shared_services.html
Nari Kannan
"While a lot of attention has been paid to the terms "Outsourcing" and "Offshoring", "Shared Services" has been gaining a lot of momentum just since 2005. A number of factors have contributed to this and almost all of it can be covered by Tom Friedman’s "Flat World" explanations: Explosive growth in Internet Bandwidth, Connectivity, Document Scanning, Imaging, Computing capabilities and lower cost destinations.
Why have an accounts payable person in each division sitting around for part of a week doing nothing when they could be processing all of accounts payables across many country offices in a centralised Shared Services Centre. Offshoring may be involved but in most cases Shared Services may still be in countries like the US and UK."