‘T is a season to be jolly… Many of us aren’t really chiming with this, but the world of shared services, although not fully protected, seems to be operating in a ‘micro economic climate’.  I chaired a conference in Paris this month on Purchase to Pay, and we opened up with a session on how the economic down turn is actually serving P2P Owners and Shared Services Directors.  How?  It was generally agreed that with more focus from the board on costs, the CFO, the senior finance team and within that, the Shared Services Director, are gathering more responsibility and therefore more power.  The company is looking to finance to keep margins healthy and tasking Finance with delivering results fast.  

Isn’t this great?  You know that project (e-invoicing?  Workflow implementation? Putting in an auto-matching tool? Implementing OCR?) which has been sitting on the back burner for over a year?  Well, times have changed and sleeping initiatives are beginning to gain pace.  ’That’ project will need dusting off as very soon it will be kick started into existence.  Vendors selling to this space are seeing their pipelines fatten, and their sales team increase a little (for the smaller vendors anyway).  I keep seeing postings on the Internet for Shared Services and P2P jobs.  Signs are telling me there is growth in this market.

So less of the doom and gloom!  The next 2 years will prove refreshing, I believe, for a lot of SSOs which have felt a resistance to progress.  All those SSOs stuck in the first phases of shared services development will experience a spurt and progress to the next stages quickly.  2009 will be an exciting time for Finance.