What is Shared Services? And what does it mean to UT?

Shared services means sharing responsibility between organizations to complete a process or service, with different organizations owning different steps in the process. Some steps in the process or service that require local knowledge are owned by specific business units, while highly transactional steps requiring processing expertise are owned by a Shared Services unit that serves the entire organization. The Shared Services Organization is staffed and managed by resources from within the university community.

The Shared Services Organization focuses on providing customer service, improving operations, and reducing cost. Its governance structure provides shared oversight, and the community is encouraged to provide feedback to ensure service quality.
Public sector organizations (government agencies, local municipalities, etc.) have begun to adopt shared Services in recent years in order to make better use of taxpayer resources. Higher education institutions have only recently begun to adopt this approach to manage administrative work. Benchmarking Peers has links to similar efforts at campuses nationwide.

Why is the University of Texas at Austin looking to implement shared services?

The University of Texas at Austin has engaged and will continue to engage in activities that reduce costs, increase productivity, and improve services. We are looking to gain the following advantages from implementing shared services:

• Enable the university to focus its resources on its academic and research mission
• Reduce administrative costs while increasing efficiency
• Improve financial controls
• Increase policy compliance and consistent governance
• Improve customer service

So why are people protesting?
The main issue with the shared services program is that it has proven to be ineffective. This program will cause many layoffs, which will then cause people whose positions are not terminated to not only do their jobs, but the jobs of the people who were fired. As a result, things are not running as smoothly because there are less people, but the amount of responsibility remains the same.