This industry research project supported a medium-size IT consulting group in making an internal IT unit a shared service centre for the whole group. When we started the project, the internal IT unit of the mother company served the whole group without any mechanisms in place for co-ordinating supply and demand, or for allocating costs. In response to the group subsidiaries demanding unbridled IT support, the mother company decided to outsource its internal IT/IS unit and create shared service centre to be utilised by the whole group.

Our project aimed at supporting the outsourcing process of the internal IT/IS function by defining an initial catalogue of IT services to be offered to the subsidiaries. To this end, we first identified the IT resources of the internal IT/IS function, including both technical and human resources, and analysed how these were used for service. Second, we collected data on the specific service demand of the different companies within the group. Based on this information, we made recommendations on services the future IT service centre should. The data on the resources used in the service generation process also provided us with the cost information required to calculate cost-oriented service prices. Interestingly, our cost-based calculations revealed that a good portion of the services used in the past would no longer be demanded by the subsidiaries if they had to take over the service costs.