Partnering to Develop a Global Footprint
Although many shared services organizations are today servicing global customers – and thereby mirroring their corporations’ global operations – few opt for developing a full-blown global SSO themselves. The time, investment, and governance demands are such that corporations are increasingly turning to a more obvious route: developing partnerships with provider companies to leverage the global networks, resources and capacities the latter have already developed in key markets.
The main advantage to such partnering hinges on “access” – namely, to an experienced project-management team, to talent, and to competitive cost structures, in regions that best serve such needs.
Globalization models
Putting aside outsourcing options for a moment, global services is an often misunderstood, indeed frequently ill-defined term. Many visualize a single global center, under one roof, with armies of multi-lingual, multi-functional staffers rotating cheerily through swinging doors, 24/7. Not quite so. Today, few practitioners actually believe in the veracity of such a model. Limitations in terms of available labor pools with requisite skills, language, culture, time zones (yes, this is still a big issue!) and to some extent functional expertise make this model fairly untenable.
More logical is to aim for global services by leveraging the best resources today’s global markets have on offer: filling staffing requirements across countries; shifting “pure” transactional work to low cost labor markets while moving expertise work to areas supplying a higher caliber university graduate; accounting for near-shore requirements where necessary; and making the most of cultural affinities and language where