State of Financial Shared Services: Part 2 Interview with SSON’s Barbara Hodge

The following is the second half of a conversation with Barbara Hodge, editor of SSON, by Christopher Jablonski, editor for Tradeshift. In the first part, we left off talking about data and storytelling, so let’s pick it up from there. Q: How is data evolving? Sure. One area that I find incredibly interesting at the moment is visual data. Tableau, for example, has progressed in the field and more and more finance shared services people are referencing using Tableau; it sounds like it’s a pretty easy match. But what it means is that instead of sharing an Excel table with statistics and data, you can now tell a story visually. When you think of someone looking at an Excel sheet, you’re giving them all the figures, and you’re kind of expecting them to draw the analysis and make their own conclusions. But the conclusions they come to may not be the ones that you intended. The beauty of having some sort of data visualization tool is that it tells the story the way you want to tell it. Take circles, as a simple example. A larger circle can denote a greater impact to processes or more dollar value and a deeper color can denote greater urgency or time lapsed. There are many ways in which you can look at something and immediately know what it’s trying to tell you. Q: How can visual storytelling help someone with their shared services career? Someone in a shared services position may be thinking to themselves, "Now that we have technology that pushes all the buttons I used to push, I’m a ‘data king’ sitting on top of all of this information and I know exactly what’s happening on (in your case) the supplier side of the company." And that is very valuable. Whereas until now, we’ve just focused on, "What does it cost?", "How quick is it?", and "How is the quality of it?" Now, we can actually make different predictions on the basis of data. Shared services people can evolve their own careers by jumping on this data bandwagon. Q: If technology is now pushing the buttons, what is there left to do as a "data king"? Let’s assume that you’ve either automated or outsourced the transactional, let’s call it boring, mundane repetitive elements. You’ve managed to make it as cheap and reliable and standardized as possible. So what remains? What remains is how your part of the process fits into the corporate agenda. And there are switches you can switch and levers you can pull to be more effective. That’s one aspect, and I guess the other aspect is whether you naturally want to evolve from a regional shared services into a global business services position. It’s kind of what everyone talks about, but they talk about it in a very automatic way. I don’t get the sense that they think that global business services are the right solution. Deborah Kops has written a few very good columns on that topic on our website. She basically says that global business services is where everyone thinks they want to get to, so you have global process owners, you have alignment, etc., but you may find that just running a regional shared services may get you the same benefits that you need, without going further. Attracting good talent has always been a challenge in adjacent fields like procurement, and that may be no different in shared service organizations. How can shared services attract the next generation? If you look at where shared services was 10 years ago, it was a really dull place, and people stayed in the same chair for a decade or more because they were really quite content just to do their thing and then go back. We have a lot of conferences in Asia and part of what I do is interview speakers on whatever topic we think is really key or hot at the moment. In Asia, the topic of how to attract and retain talent in the face of a fairly fast-growing market is a hot one. The next company can come in and for a fistful of dollars more can steal your valuable, trained staff who suddenly knows a lot about shared services, and who a month or a year ago, didn’t. A modern day finance shared services center is not an old-fashioned accounting center. That’s the single most important point you have to make, because if you’re not making the point, you’ll attract the same people that used to come in. They won’t all be accountants, but you’ll get the same caliber. The world has moved on. So, given the fact that we have automation, given the fact that we have these global process lines and that you can be sitting in the limo, you can be supplying folks all over Asia, you can be supplying globally – that’s a very exciting place to be. That’s not boring. If you set up a shared services center in the Philippines, it is not a call center. And unless you clearly differentiate that, you’re going to run into the trouble of how to recruit someone to stay with you for a couple of years instead of being there six months. [inlinead] Q: Can you share any examples of leaders making the transition? I recently interviewed someone who’d been at Unisys for about 20 years, in their U.S. finance office. She explained that when she first started, everything was on paper and it was just mundane, but she’s still there because her role is growing. She’s now involved with the global centers and has evolved her career with the times. Similarly, I spoke to someone recently at Johnson & Johnson who is redefining a new shared services model for the digital world. She said that she’s worked in shared services for 10 years, and now she finds herself back at platform zero because she has to redefine everything. She can’t say, "Alright, here’s a template that worked well five years ago, so let’s just use it and freshen up the language." In the U.S., Filippo Passerini is transitioning out of his role as head of global business services at Procter & Gamble, where he was also a board-level CIO. When he took over GBS, he recognized that agility and technology was really going to be the key to driving more value out of the support services. The spotlight shone on the technology side, so much so that he took responsibility for the tech side in addition to GBS delivery. I think a lot of us look at P&G as a sort of poster child for business services, because they do such an incredibly good job at it. If you look at examples of shared services folks who report to the CFO or who have a lot of influence, their success is usually because the C-suite is open-minded and modern enough to recognize the impact and the importance of the support services side. If you can see that the senior folks within shared services have made a good career for themselves, I think that says a lot for the actual shared services roles. Certainly, I’m biased because I’ve been living in a shared services world for a long time; I think it’s really the brains of a business because of all the data that runs through it. Q: Is there an end game or will shared services continue to change? Absolutely. I joined SSON in 2000, and back then I think Xerox was one of the first to launch what we call "shared services". Many companies claim that they’ve been doing that kind of centralized thing for decades, but it wasn’t really termed shared services. Honeywell, I think, was among the first implementers. Back then, the talk was all about getting to a "lights-out" scenario. It’s funny to think of it now because it was right at the beginning of the shared services idea, and people were saying, "We’re going to centralize," "We’re going to offshore it to a low-cost location", "We’re going to automate it"… In time, ideally, all the people could walk right out, we could turn the lights off, and the whole thing would just run itself. I’ve never heard of anyone who actually does that, but it’s so interesting to find that 15 years later, the conversation is still the same. But now we’re not just talking about this dream world. Now, we have robotics. People are talking about implementing armies of robots – not necessarily tangibly, but theoretically – to take over thousands of mundane processes. The whole idea of a "lights-out" shared services suddenly seems much more possible. And just because everything is automated doesn’t mean there’s not a role for knowledge-based service. Will the business just trust its processes to run smoothly? Processes are not just going to move up and improve, right? They’ll carry on the same trajectory, so when you want to move that line up, that’s when you need that ability to look at the data and to find an opportunity to shift what we’re doing. I think that’s why I think shared services will always be interesting. You don’t have old-fashioned jobs anymore. You’re now contributing brain power, knowledge, and ability to interpret what’s going on and to prescribe actions for the business that will help it to make leaps instead of just grow along the same trajectory. I guess that’s what everyone’s chasing, in truth. And, I think that’s where the technology comes in. Whatever makes it smoother, faster, and whatever delivers the most data. Whatever helps you to ‘step up’ is going to be the differentiator. [inlinead]

State of Financial Shared Services: Part 2 Interview with SSON’s Barbara Hodge

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