Governance of Shared Services in Public Administration

Abstract

Services are more and more shared among public agencies to gain efficiency benefits. The governance of shared services is a complicated endeavor as it often involves multiple agencies having different objectives and resources, the number of shared services used varies among agencies, technology sophistication differs and non-shared resources of public agencies are interwoven with shared services. The research presented in this paper is aimed at developing a better understanding of the IT governance necessary to share services in public administration. Two case studies are presented and analyzed from a resource-based and dynamic capability view. We found that the ability to share services and the accomplishment of agencies objectives is largely determined by the governance mechanisms. Governance mechanisms need to deal with the different characteristics of agencies and balance customization and commoditization of services to ensure citizenand businessorientation and at the same time accomplish efficiency.