Strategy Alignment and Performance Evaluation for Shared Service Centers : A Longitudinal Study on the Role of Balanced Scorecard

Although the SSC concept has gained increasing attention in practice, researchers have not examined the associated issues sufficiently. Through integration in business processes, shared service centers (SSCs) aim to reduce costs and provide better services to internal customers for efficient and effective operations. This longitudinal field study explores how an organization could make existing SSCs more successful. Specifically, we investigate two issues: first, whether using the balanced scorecard (BSC) can assist the employees of SSCs to better understand and achieve the strategies of other operating units as well as those of the headquarters, and second, whether using BSC can better measure the performance of SSCs and reveal the value of SSCs. We illustrate the processes and impacts related to the implementation of BSC on SSCs in a large car dealership in Taiwan. The results show that most employees in SSCs strongly sense and understand organizational strategies after implementing BSC; however, SSCs' employees do not believe that BSC provides effective performance measures on SSCs. We also find that the managers and employees of SSCs focus more on revenue, cost, and serving internal customers after the implementation of BSC