Multinational companies managed their global IT structures using three common structural

elements to link the enterprisewide IT leadership which are shared services, centers of excellence
(CoEs), and value managers (VMs). Their objectives are to achieve economies of scale, drive
innovation and enable responsiveness.

1. IT Shared Services are structural units that consolidate common IT functions to achieve scale by
providing standardized services thus removing cost, duplication, and complexity.

2. IT Centers of Excellence (CoEs) are also known as competency centers or centers of expertise are
units that contain strategic IT capabilities where they pool expertise physically or virtually across the
globe. They serve as strategic resources that focus on designing and developing new solutions.

3. Value Managers (VMs) are groups of IT managers that seek to maximize the value of IT for
specific business units. VMs, sometimes called customer relationship managers are organized so that
the voices of its key customers can be heard, consolidated, and appropriately channelled for
prioritization.

The three elements show that IT is not just viewed as technology supplier. It has been
used to add value to the organization and provide strategic capability. It helped the
businesses to focus on their user-consumer and services thus becoming service-
oriented to provide customer-driven to user problems and opportunities.

CEO: Arriving to solutions is so costly and is inefficient since we have 4 business units
and in each unit we have hired 3 persons for 3 different functions in which to sum up,
we have to give compensation to 12 employees. Can you have a suggestion for such
problem?

Management Consultant: Ma’am, in this new trend of management accounting we

already have what we called shared services.

CEO: Then?

Management Consultant: Through shared services, we can now focus on our customers
and marketing and not considering how IT, finance, and hr gonna work.

CEO: It is indeed a good suggestion. That’s all for today.

CEO: How does it work?

Management Consultant: For example, these business departments that we have, the
HR, finance and IT can be into one body and those functions that overlap in each
business unit shall be on one industry on themselves.

So, there will only be 3 main industries. Thus, having to compensate 3 persons in the
future compared to 12 persons we have now, we can achieve economies of scale
through increasing quality, productivity and cost – efficiency for our company. Also,
ma’am adapting shared services can help us grow and increase our business.