The Growth and Transformation of Global Business Services

This IDC Perspective explains why organizations consider moving from shared services to global business services (GBS). Shared services are typically centralized units that provide one or a handful of processes for an organization, while GBS often provides multiple cross-functional services across finance, human resources, IT, procurement, and more.Benefits of the GBS model include increased efficiency, productivity, speed, and visibility. Yet GBS itself continues to evolve to embrace higher levels of technology and automation like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, and process discovery. These advances will bring much-needed transparency, customization, and efficiency."Shared services have evolved in many cases into global business services, and now GBS is evolving in its own right," says Tom Seal, senior research director, Enterprise Software Sourcing Strategies, IDC. "Today, GBS is still essentially a human-centric process but over the next five years it will become a predominantly digital service. People will never be fully absent, though; they will still be involved to deal with exceptions."