Assessing the potential of inter-organisational shared services

Shared Services (SS) involves the convergence and streamlining of an organisation’s functions to ensure timely service delivery as effectively and efficiently as possible. As a management structure designed to promote value generation, cost savings and improved service delivery by leveraging on economies of scale, the idea of SS is driven by cost reduction and improvements in quality levels of service and efficiency. Current conventional wisdom is that the potential for SS is increasing due to the increasing costs of changing systems and business requirements for organisations and in implementing and running information systems. In addition, due to commoditisation of large information systems such as enterprise systems, many common, supporting functions across organisations are becoming more similar than not, leading to an increasing overlap in processes and fuelling the notion that it is possible for organisations to derive benefits from collaborating and sharing their common services through an inter-organisational shared services (IOSS) arrangement. While there is some research on traditional SS, very little research has been done on IOSS. In particular, it is unclear what are the potential drivers and inhibitors of IOSS. As the concepts of IOSS and SS are closely related to that of Outsourcing, and their distinction is sometimes blurred, this research has the first objective of seeking a clear conceptual understanding of the differences between SS and Outsourcing (in motivators, arrangements, benefits, disadvantages, etc) and based on this conceptual understanding, the second objective of this research is to develop a decision model (Shared Services Potential model) which would aid organisations in deciding which arrangement would be more appropriate for them to adopt in pursuit of process improvements for their operations. As the context of the study is on universities in higher education sharing administrative services common to or across them and with the assumption that such services were homogenous in nature, this thesis also reports on a case study. The case study involved face to face interviews from representatives of an Australian university to explore the potential for IOSS. Our key findings suggest that it is possible for universities to share services common across them as most of them were currently using the same systems although independently.

Public-oriented interactive environmental decision support system

With the application of GIS methodologies to spatial data, researchers can now identify patterns of occurrence for many social problems including health-issues and crime. Further more, since this type of data also contains clues as to the underlying causes of social problems, it can be used to make well-educated and consequently, more effective policy decisions.

An online urban information system initiative for the Shibuya city, Tokyo

The computing tools and technologies with urban information systems are designed to enhance planners’ capability to deal with complex urban environments and to plan for prosperous and liveable communities. This paper examines the role of Online Urban Information Systems or in another words Internet based Geographic Information Systems as spatial decision support systems to aid local planning process. This paper introduces a prototype Internet GIS model that aims to integrate a public oriented interactive decision support system for urban planning process. This model, referred as a ‘Community based Internet GIS’, incorporates advanced information technologies and community involvement in decision making processes on the web environment. This innovative model has been recently applied to a pilot case in Tokyo and this paper concludes with the preliminary results of this project.