Shared Services and the Cloud
The drive for more immediate business efficiency and the long-term financial viability of service offerings has been reinforced by the recent reductions in funding for universities and colleges. This challenging environment has made some institutions start to look to new models of service provision, including externally hosted and service based models of software deployment. This may include cloud based services or applications, or as part of a Shared Service arrangement. Successful adoption and integration of such models requires a number of cultural and process changes that have historically been barriers to the uptake of wide spread adoption.
Institutions will need to consider carefully (for cultural / mission fit, and value of investment) what areas of their end-to-end business service are appropriate candidates for off-campus sourcing, and at what level they rely on such provision. These might include:
- Platform-as-a-Service: Offering enterprise middleware components such as messaging systems or workflow engines as an online service
- Software-as-a-Service: swapping in-house instances of software (e.g. email, finance systems, customer relationship management) for hosted versions
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service: Providing storage and compute as online services
- Services-as-a-Service: where a much higher aggregated level of functionality is provided by a third party to replace a larger area of the institution's business process model
Each brings its own degree of business functional engineering, integration and management and up-front investment and ongoing overhead, for which varying levels and periods of return may be expected.
