Standardise Shared Services So Your AI Can Scale

You can run one shared service the same way in every region and every client account, and keep the local differences that genuinely need to be there. You already hold the starting material: procedures, SLAs, training manuals, system configurations and the people in each region who know why their version looks the way it does.

This episode separates the two parts of every shared service. The global standard is the core that should be identical everywhere, such as setting up payroll or issuing a laptop. Justified variation is the smaller share that a country’s law or a client contract requires. With that split agreed, services become reusable enterprise capabilities: transitions to a new provider move faster, retained teams and providers know who owns each step, automation is built once and reused, and measures connect to business and customer outcomes instead of local definitions of green. The episode draws on Deloitte’s Global Business Services Survey 2025, which reports GBS organisations prioritising process standardisation, end-to-end ownership, automation, analytics and GenAI investment, and on SSON, which names standardisation, harmonisation and flexible service delivery as core shared-services objectives. It also covers the discovery questions that show where to begin: which services vary most, which variation is required and which is historical, and where local SLA performance and stakeholder experience sit furthest apart.

The practical starting point is one shared service. Compare how it runs across two regions or client accounts, mark which differences are required, and standardise the rest. IGX360 Insights shows which parts of that process knowledge you can stand behind, with provenance, confidence, freshness and ownership beside each answer. Which of your shared services would gain most from one agreed standard?