Shared Services Need More Imagination
Suppose you need to drill a hole in the wall to hang an item but do not own a power drill. You may regard it as expensive to buy a power drill and consider renting one. Sharing is the solution. The sharing industry is an emerging, highly flexible economic network that allows people to share resources, either free or for a fee.
The important idea of the sharing industry is that people might only need an item for a relatively short period. The private part of shared services has been moving towards this area since the beginning of the 1980s, and then the public part has taken note of the benefits and continued for best practice. The United States and Australia among others have had shared services in government since the late 1990s.
With the rise of the sharing industry, the best-known shared bikes and shared cars have got a lot of public attention. This kind of transportation is so environmentally-friendly that it is increasingly popular among people in many cities.
Of course shared services don't need to be limited to machines. The real pay-off in shared services probably lies in renting out smaller, less heavy items. For example, in today's casual environment, you don't need a tie unless you're going to a wedding or a job interview. So some companies would let you pick up a tie when you needed it and only when you needed it. Another example is an umbrella-sharing service. Since visitors don't want to be carrying umbrellas all the way, it would be cheaper and easier to simply borrow an umbrella on one street corner and drop it off on another.
Recently organisations that have centralised their IT functions have begun to take a close look at the technology services that their IT departments provide for customers, evaluating where it makes sense to provide technology components. E-mail and scanning (扫描) operations were obvious early candidates. Many organisations are now offering their document-intensive operations as a shared service. There is no doubt that people are calling for the expansion of shared services to more and more areas.