Finding opportunities for efficiency in shared services

Part of the mitigation for the financial crisis the higher education sector continues to find itself in will be an increase in the use of shared services.

We got a sense that this was coming when Jisc and KPMG released their report (Collaboration for a sustainable future) back in November 2024, and when the Universities UK Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce commissioned Jisc to come up with an action plan to make these shared service dreams a reality.

Today’s report – Opportunities for efficiency through shared services – isn’t quite an action plan, but it moves closer to the messy world of implementation than previous iterations of this idea.

The animating principle is that to be truly successful, shared services need to be sector led. Sure – the government, and existing actors, can help, but it is universities (and, one assumes, other higher education providers) that will “consider how best to apply the actions in their own context”.

Jisc spoke to 60 institutions and held workshops, both to get a sense of what is currently going on and to make an assessment of what the barriers are. Like in Collaboration… we are favoured with a rundown of generational shared service hits: Janet, UCAS, Jobs.ac.uk, Uniac, SUMS – but we are reminded not to assume that a “service is efficient mainly because it is shared”.

There’s not quite a playbook – a perfect-every-time recipe – but successful shared services tend do have some things in common. They tend to start small, but be driven by people with a high sector profile. Services tend to be specialist – covering skilled roles that are difficult for organisations to provide in house – and remain so. This is all backed by a strong business model (an “obviously useful service institutions were willing to pay for”) sparked by seedfunding to get established.

What about barriers? Well, we already know that a lack of process standardisation within providers is the big stumbling block, and this report adds a lack of trust in a new shared service provider, and a lack of up front capital to establish the service.

It is salutary to recall that not every attempt to design a shared service is successful – older readers will be wondering about things like the UK eUniversity, which is perhaps the classic example of a “monolithic shared service organisation that has overspent and underdelivered”. Casting the net wider, Jisc examines examples in local government and other parts of the education system alongside HE.

There’s practicalities in here, the niceties of setting up and managing a collaborative organisation, and the benefits of efficiencies of scale and network effects. There’s a whole section on cost sharing group VAT exemptions (Jisc goes along with UUK and BUFDG in calling for reforms).

But it is difficult to shake the feeling that much of what is presented here is well known, and that the recommendations (adopt a “shared services first” mindset, a central service catalogue, co-ordination between services) are at a remove from cash-strapped individual institutions looking for savings. One of the hopes from the taskforce was that it could use its profile to knock some heads together, and provide the impetus (and ideally the seed capital) to start realising some of these savings – this report is not the report that does that, and by leaving it to the sector to spontaneously combine in ways that drive savings it plays a long game that we may not really have the time to play.