Shared service strategies in local government – a multiple case study exploration

Analysis of Shared Services Center Deployment at a University Hospital (CENTROMED) in Natal, Brazil: A Study on Availability and Capacity

Purpose

The hospital is an organization that has its own characteristics that differentiate it from other institutions. It is characterized as a company providing services of social purpose, with a great operational complexity, due to the diversity of services provided. These organizations are dependent on technology to play the role of assisting society. Technology is onerous: it is up to the aforementioned institutions to adopt management tools to control these costs. The present study explains the process of implementing a shared service centre (CENTROMED) for the management of hospital medical equipment (HME) at the Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes (HUOL) in the city of Natal, RN.

Patients and Methods

In order to achieve a successful implementation, four key steps were taken: process modelling; determination of key performance indicators, organization of physical arrangement; and adequate training and development of human resources. The work followed an action research approach focusing on three main methodological steps: identification of HUOL clinical engineering team’s demands, definition of the process for providing the equipment service, and definition of the supply items that will be managed.

Results

The preliminary results of this research indicate that the centralization of the management of the HME contributed to the optimization of the processes, the reduction of the costs and the availability of the equipment, thus providing a powerful management tool to support the hospital operational management.

Conclusion

The utilization of the shared service center for the management of hospital medical equipment is ultimately linked to the patient’s well-being as it contributes to the agility in hospital procedures and provides support in maintaining the capacity of attendance of the assistance teams.

Managerial challenges to realizing IT shared services in a public university

Purpose

Many governments and public organizations are turning to shared service arrangements to decrease costs while increasing service levels. This paper aims to elucidate the fine-grained challenges managers face as they adjust to working under a shared service arrangement.

Design/methodology/approach

A two-year longitudinal ethnographic field study followed the IT shared service transformation process at a large public university. Meeting observations, emails, documents and interviews were used in the qualitative analysis.

Findings

The research identifies 11 challenges faced by management undergoing a transition to shared services. The authors use a taxonomy of management challenges based on the organizational perspectives literature (Knol et al., 2014) to organize the challenges and relate them to prior literature.

Research limitations/implications

The novel findings include the importance of changing organizational culture, balancing dual interests of cost and customer focus, establishing a sense of urgency and achieving process standardization through practicing when adopting a shared service arrangement. The results from a single case study may not by generalizable to other organizations.

Originality/value

This study provides a nuanced and fine-grained understanding of the managerial challenges of adopting IT-shared services. This unique longitudinal data set describes in nuanced detail the challenges faced by frontline managers.

Public Sector Shared Services Move Out of the "Back-Office"

Shared service providers typically host routine and administrative business processes as a way to standardize company practices and increase efficiency. In the public sector, however, its application to functions critical to an organization"s central mission is moving shared services out of the "back-office." This research employs and extends Bergeron"s (2003) framework to case analysis of two public safety networks within the United States, and prompts the addition of two new characteristics for public sector shared services, Public Policy and Type of Service. In this sector, we find that legislative controls, i.e. policy, manage information and communications technology (ICT) investment to meet efficiency and especially effectiveness goals, while mission criticality serves to trump cost considerations. Recommendations resulting from this research should lead to improvements in the cost and performance of public-sector shared services and their role in ICT-supported, mission-critical, shared services.

Standardized but flexible information exchange for networked public administrations

Purpose

Governmental institutions must cooperate with other organizations across institutional boundaries to achieve high-quality service offerings. The required cooperation may lead to complex networks, including several of the thousands of public administrations in the many federal layers of a single country. This paper aims to address the key challenge of the proper management of the information exchange between networked actors, which is generally conducted by means of forms.

Design/methodology/approach

Following the design science research paradigm, this research develops a method that assists in the design and maintenance of forms in public administrations.

Findings

Discussions in the project’s focus groups add evidence to the researchers’ expectation that the method developed in this study improves the quality of forms while reducing the effort required for their design and maintenance.

Research limitations/implications

This paper includes an evaluation of the approach based on qualitative feedback from the project’s stakeholders, although the implementation of the workflows and procedures is subject to future work that evaluates the approach in a variety of practical settings.

Practical implications

The method developed in this paper allows public administrations and legislative authorities to design and manage forms in a cooperative way. Software developers can assume the existence of information structures. The approach extends the BOMOS standardization framework to the operational level.

Originality/value

The main contribution of this paper is the development of a novel method that will change how information exchange is managed in public administrations.

Observing organisational transformation of the public sector in the e-government era

Purpose

– The purpose of this study is to develop a more comprehensive framework that would provide better insight into the characteristics of organisational transformation (OT) of the public sector organisations in the e-government era. Despite the widespread opinion that successful implementation of information communication technology (ICT) is strongly correlated with the appropriate OT of the public sector, a critical analysis of the available literature within the field indicates that this important dimension of e-government development has been dealt with only partially. Accordingly, the paper attempts the following: to develop a more comprehensive framework for observing OT, to empirically explain the framework through analysis of three Slovenian e-government projects and to develop some general characteristics of ICT-induced OT in the public sector.

Design/methodology/approach

– The development of the framework is based on an analysis of the available literature, whereas the explanation of such is based on a multiple-case study approach.

Findings

– The paper contributes to a clearer understanding of what the main characteristics of OT in the e-government era are and how they should be observed.

Research limitations/implications

– The findings can help researchers to more accurately focus their attention on the most critical aspects of OT. The identified attributes can provide an important basis for future research, particularly from the methodological perspective.

Practical implications

– The framework can help public managers to focus their attention on the most important attributes of ICT-induced OT to exploit ICT potentials more efficiently.

Originality/value

– The paper attempts to demystify the concept of OT in the e-government field and place it in a more solid theoretical and empirically explained framework.

Developing a data sharing framework: a case study

Purpose

– The purpose of the research project was to examine the process of developing a data sharing framework between different public sector organisations.

Design/methodology/approach

– A two-year case study of a data sharing project between a UK fire and rescue service, local council, NHS primary care trust and a police force was undertaken.

Findings

– It is important to carefully determine the requirements for data sharing, to establish data sharing agreements, to have secure arrangements for data sharing, and to ensure compliance with data protection legislation.

Research limitations/implications

– Data sharing between public sector organisations can operate effectively if appropriate care is taken when creating data sharing agreements between partner organisations.

Practical implications

– Data sharing can assist in reducing duplication of effort between public sector organisations and can reduce costs and enable more co-ordinated provision of public services.

Originality/value

– The detailed analysis of a data sharing case study identified the need for a systematic data sharing framework. Such a framework is proposed and illustrated with practical examples of specification, implementation and evaluation.