Hi I am David and I am one of the Board Directors at Shared Services Forum UK!!
WHERE WERE YOU 10 YEARS AGO?
Following a career in finance covering operational controllership, business analysis & systems implementation & numerous shared service centre & business process outsourcing leadership roles, I took the bold decision to set up my own consulting & advisory business. This was a bold and deliberate move which enabled me to draw upon the many years of experience to embark on working with businesses requiring change & finance transformational support and more so to be self accountable and in effect be my own boss.
I realised to my advantage very early on, the deep and broad experience gained over the years, was significantly critical with the network I had developed and nurtured over the years. This helped me enormously in carving out a portfolio of assignments working with many clients in different business sectors but always within the shared services arena and in fact I am personally celebrating 20 years operating in shared services
Ten years ago I had an appetite for managing change and was excited by the thrill of delivering finance effectiveness strategies around efficiency & effectiveness utilising lean as an approach to continuous improvement (CI) IT enablement was a big motivator and a huge game changer with emerging technologies, even with outsourcing strategies in play the investment IT innovation was a significant upshift in driving larger volumes, quicker and faster and more accurately. It was the vogue. I do look back and in nearly all of the shared service centres I have been in have adopted similar approaches and typically embed in high end transactional processing enablement. Today, this hasn’t really changed and using technology enablement has just progressively allowed the pace to be even quicker and faster.
WHERE DO YOU SEE SHARED SERVICES IN 10 YEARS?
In the next ten years I suspect the pace and level of necessary response to continue and the challenge will be similar in terms of keeping up, regaining and staying in control but the outcomes different. Things do come at us at a fast pace and priority planning becomes a daily norm but big businesses are not agile so can use that to our advantage and work with 3 to 5, 5 to 10 year strategies and adopting tried and tested technological tools. Legislation & control is continuing to have an influence and tends to become a necessary evil. So for me I anticipate, the development in robotics will continue but much more will be the intelligent automation and artificial intelligence strategies with a control bias which will require my own personal development and adaption to stay relevant.
WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT SSF UK?
What a great question. Think it would be easier for me to answer what I don’t love about the Shared Services Forum UK!
Over the many years my involvement in the forum has meant I have been able to become part of its foundation and has a very special place in my heart such that it has become a personal passion of mine – a hobby, a "side hustle", call it whatever but never a day goes by without me tapping into it. I love the variation the forum offers, from being part of a continuously evolving business to the excitement of being at the forefront, meeting members old and new, guest speakers, sponsors & partners, visiting new places for meetings, and most of all the great network - as it’s the people who make it.I love how we all comes together, which in turn has opened up doors for us to hold such prestigious events that perhaps many of us wouldn’t dream of in the day job. The more we do the more great memories we create, and those memories we remember!!!!
