Event review – Shared services Summit 5-7th February 2007 – London UK

Summit – literally means peak or high point; for many delegates this event was just that!  Graham Gornall, Director for the East Lancashire Financial Services (part of the UK’s National Health Service) said “the conference was extremely thought provoking, we’re only just scratching the surface in terms of shared services development compared to what’s going on in the private sector, but I’ve come away with lots of material and ideas I hope to use in our operations” (not literally I hope Graham, but we know what you mean!).

Graham was amongst a small minority of public sector delegates attending the event, Tahiana Jefferis from Surrey County Council was another, I sat next to her as we shared in the discussion group session facilitated by Dan Foley (Marks and Spencer Shared Services) and Maarten Verburg (Dupont)   - our group’s question to the panel was about continuous improvement – I was happy to hear that benchmarking was a ‘must have’ tool in the continuous improvement toolset – even the public sector I was told are keen to look across sectors to find best practices and compare performance.  What did strike me as I listened to Dan and Martin was that, performance gap is often the result of implementing best practices, but it will not identify the difference that high quality, experienced, enthusiastic, articulate leadership makes.  This session was a real highlight; well done Dan and Martin!

The right start is an imperative for conferences as well as shared services and even Alex Ferguson (Manchester United) often says, “If we don’t set off at our kind of tempo it’s sometimes difficult to pick it up later!”, so congratulations to both Michael Janssen (Hackett) and Michael Hensen (GE) for a great start to the event. The globalisation theme and the impact on resource deployment, the skills mix and the organisation model was re-enforced by these two experienced professionals – How many delegates will already have drafted their own version of Michael’s ‘ nine-blocker’, a two-dimensional grid positioning services in relation to ‘Business Impact’ and ‘Service Competitiveness’.  Listening to Michael talk about ‘revenue growth of 42%’ for their re-modelled services was in itself interesting – a show of hand from the delegates revealed only a handful of others who talked in terms of revenue stream.  No surprise that Graham Noble (BP), who was there to help identify ways of ‘unlocking value-added’, found ‘the GE story’ particularly compelling.

A surprisingly large proportion of overseas delegates were at the event; Qatar, Dubai, Netherlands, Nordics, Belgium, France and others were represented. Jacques Hameleers (Hill's Pet Nutrition, the Pet Food Division of Colgate Palmolive) was there from The Netherlands to find ideas, keep up with latest thinking so that he could help develop a strategic plan for his shared service operation – rolling out standard templates for implementation across business units.  “Anecdotal and written material from the event would help re-enforce the message that shared services and best practices do work” he said. 

I spoke to a number of exhibitors at the event and they all seemed pleased with the interest and type of delegates there.  It struck me that amongst the many usual exhibitors there were several new names to get to know; B2BE, Jefferson Wells, Orbis, Brainware (the others will have to forgive me for not mentioning them, and FASSBEX is independent from IQPC so don’t blame them).

IQPC should be specially commended for inviting Sahar Hashemi (famous with her brother Bobby for building Coffee Republic) as a guest speaker.  This was a real highlight for many including myself! Her message that we all have the entrepreneur in us may have seemed a little remote from the conference theme, but there were many parallels to corporate life and shared services.  Who could have missed the comparison with her market research (30 stops on the circle line) and trips to her favourite coffee shop in New York, with the ‘benchmarking’ we were all doing at the event.  And when you have great idea, persevering despite the rejections may be a thought we can take back when dealing with our IT partners (look out Matt).  I’m look forward to reading her book “Anyone can do it” (I queued to have one personally signed by her) to inspire me to revisit my ‘business plan’. (See link to Amazon at foot of article to order your copy)

I attend five or six events of this nature per year so I’m always interested to see whether there are new stories, new insights or new ways of delivering value to the delegates; in particular could IQPC differentiate this event from their Annual Shared Services Week.  It seems to me, judging from my discussions with a large number of delegates, that they succeeded in providing an event at which the more mature shared services could look beyond the set-up stage, stabilisation and even maturity and at ‘what next!’.  It’s true that accounts payable was still being discussed but I detected it was much more in the context of the ‘end-to-end, purchase to pay process’.  I heard lots more about the strategic partner role, decision support and controllership in the context of shared services than I’ve heard at other events.  I will listen with interest to the audio of the ‘blue-sky room’ (another ‘first’ at this event) which is being made available to delegates. Two of the ‘blue-sky’ facilitators, Phil Searle and Sameer Jalundhwala (speakers at our web seminars in the next few weeks) agreed that these sessions had stretched the imagination and made them dig deep into there considerable experience to map out the future landscape in a globalised, networked world.

To the many new friends and the many refreshed acquaintances made at the event all the best in converting the many inspirations into tangible results.  As Sahar said, “it can take fifteen years to become an overnight success!”

If you would like to register to hear Phil Searle or Sameer Jalundhwala and other speakers in our 'best practice' series click here