My Shared Services Experience as a Director

Many of you may be wondering ,what it takes to set up a shared services center, I am attempting to put forth the challenges in creating a shared services center:


My journey into shared services ,and setting up the entire Global Marketing Shared Services center in India was an amazing feat to live through , It all happened when I was in GDS(NAIO) inside Oracle, I was presented an opportunity to work for Oracle Marketing @ Oracle.
First I was leading a Data Management solution ,to automate cleansing of contact and account data ,presenting reports to the upper management within marketing. I worked on a large Datawarehouse , building small datamarts for data to be cleansed and loaded back to the system

There were plenty of instances of data lying with various people, inside their computers,with various systems , now there was no strategy developed so far how these data inside various systems were combined as one single system. We had a real difficult situation ,for not only pulling up the data but also of a different nature , to inculcate a Governance model for automating data.

This was also political in nature, as there were Data owners were IT owned and not marketing owned

We did plan a strategy to have an entire Data Management Group to make Database Marketing
robust .

After starting the shared services,

The most important challenge ,was to show that POC shared services work, It not only takes ones skill in convincing others ,but convincing oneself that you are going in the right direction.

There were also fears that one may loose their jobs ,as it was a mandate from top management to plan and develop a shared service center in India.

More in my next blog post