Organisations have always pursued shared services and/ or outsourcing strategies to reduce costs and improve efficiency of business functions like HR, procurement, finance and IT.

But it’s time for a new approach. Many enterprises have already achieved the vast majority of performance improvements that were possible from a single-function approach to shared services and outsourcing. Scaling up and expanding the scope of outsourcing initiatives beyond single business function requires an approach called ‘bundled outsourcing’: consolidating multiple business functions and their underlying IT systems with a single service provider, guided by a common system of governance.