Accountability, Transparency, and Liability Creation through State Shared Service Centers
States and provinces frequently perform their backoffice services -such as information technology, accounting, and human resources -in each of their agencies, which leads to inefficiencies. Establishing a state shared service center (SSC) eliminates redundancies by creating an organizational unit that provides back-office services for multiple agencies. An empirical study was conducted amongst 37 US states and state agencies that use SSCs. The study found that the establishment of a SSC leads to increases in transparency. Whereas only 36 percent of the surveyed organizations report that they know the exact total costs for their back-office services performed within their agencies, 73 percent know the costs of such services when moving to a SSC. For state agencies not utilizing SSCs, only 6 percent can report their costs on a per-transaction basis, whereas 33 percent of agencies using SSCs know their per-transaction costs. The establishment of a SSC also makes it easier to hold SSC management accountable for their performance. In the study, 28 percent of the respondents report very high or high monetary consequences for SSC management for over-or underachievement. Two case studies about the establishment of SSCs at the State of Illinois and Ohio illustrate what states do to increase the efficiency and transparency of their back-office services through shared services.
Gerd Schwarz
Nottingham University Business School China, University of Nottingham Ningbo China,Ningbo, P.R.China, 315100 and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences,Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, 02138
国际会议
2011 International Conference on Public Administration(2011公共管理国际会议)
成都
英文
154-161
2011-10-18（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）