Proposal for shared services performance management model applied to portugueses public administration

Abstract

In order to improve the quality of the services and the relationship between the central public administration and citizens the Portuguese government launched an egovernment initiative including both front and back-office processes. The implementation of shared services represents one of the transformation vectors having as major goal the gain of efficacy by reducing the organisational structures and the gain of efficiency through the rationalization of back-office processes. The main target was first the development and implementation of both financial and human resources shared services management solutions and afterwards the enlargement of this concept to other domains such as Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The shared services implementation target is the central public administration, which employs 550.000 workers. Depending on the success of this initiative it may be later extended to regional and local entities encompassing a total of 800.000 workers. This shared services initiative catalyzes the need of having a global public administration structure in order to provide services with the required quality and to implement adequate and flexible process oriented business models. In 2007 GeRAP, a public enterprise owned by the Ministry of Finances and Public Administration, was created aiming a suitable implementation of this paradigm. As an outcome of the financial and human resources shared services implementation experience, a Portuguese Governmental Open Cloud (GO-Cloud) project was launched with the aim of deploying an ICT public infrastructure able to integrate other private and public clouds and to offer quality infrastructure services at lower costs. The GO-Cloud overlays the double objective of establishing a technological platform that will leverage the shared services adoption spreading among public administration entities, concerning both the already deployed financial and budgetary management solution and the shared human resource management solution, and the provisioning of ICT resources and services in a more flexible and effective way. A successful implementation of shared services in a public and wide environment such as the Portuguese public administration requires a suitable reference architecture, reliable and scalable infrastructures, automated procedures, adequate management processes, an agile organization and adequate relationship models, based on a set of core competences. Thus, this paper focuses the way shared services are being implemented and managed in the Portuguese public administration, considering both the scope of this activity and the differences between public and private contexts. It 8º Congresso Nacional de Administração Pública – 2011 | Página 338 also presents the adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and both the business model and the shared services analysis model (SSAM) used to grant GeRAP internal and external alignment. SSAM contributes with a formal analysis structure through the identification of main pillars that sustain the shared services implementation in Portuguese public administration. The defined pillars will be used as analysis vectors to create a performance model which will be able to evaluate the performance reached by shared services implementation and to anticipate some actions.