Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Shared Services

After a discussion about which shared services NetHope should be focused on, we got another presentation from WorldVision about how they’ve approached shared services. One thing to note up front is that WorldVision has a significant amount of money (just under $1B), and all of it unrestricted, I believe. They have a pretty nice framework for shared services, and he shared some slides he used to talk to business units and executives. Good stuff. They embarked on a multi-year benchmarking process which compared them to other companies – none of which were NetHope members. All of them appeared to be large, public, Fortune500 companies. Interesting. At the end of the first analysis, they hired Accenture to help them learn in detail about their infrastructure in Africa. All of this is towards figuring out what to offer in a shared services model. It reminds of what I’ve read about other large companies – didn’t expect to see that at a NetHope meeting. I'm sure there's a lot to learn from them - just haven't quite figured out what it is yet. He's going to present in more detail on Thurs morning - that's should be enlightening.

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