Human Resource Management Research 2012, 2(5): 65-73 DOI: 10.5923/j.hrmr.20120205.01 Shared Services Centre for Client Convenience: A New Perspective in Public Service Delivery. (Evidence from One-Corner-Stock-Shop in Niger State, Nigeria) Musa Muhammad Lawal, Nura Abubakar Allumi * Department of Public Administration, Faculty of M anagement Sciences, Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto, 840244, Nigeria Abstract Shared Services Centre (SSC) is one of the tenets of Digital-Era Governance (DEG) that integrates information systems for organizations to easily interact with each other sharing activities, processes, services, knowledge, technological infrastructure and best practices without necessarily affecting their autonomy. The Nigeria public sector is yet to make parallel with this basic tenets of DEG in it bureaucratic processes which have advisedly affected it level of service delivery. This paper intends to analyze empirically the motives and other management issues of establishing Niger State One-Corner-Stock-Shop (OCSS). The paper however employed a standalone qualitative case study. The findings revealed that the OCSS is still work in progress into ICT’s potentials that for now creates clients conveniences, enable sustainable ICT infrastructure and enhanced mutual interactions for participating organizations. Keywords Shared Services Centre, Digital-Era Governance, One-Corner-Stock-Shop, Niger state 1. Introduction Dunleavy[1], asserts that we are in a ‘digital-era governance’(DEG), characterised by using ICT to reintegrate services, design services around people’s needs, and enable citizens to access services online. In spite of this, there has been persistent global outcry on the declining level of public service delivery. With shrinking revenues of public organizations, clients savvy as a result of globalization and growing service demands, organizations are joining forces to provide enhanced services to their clients. Shared Services (SS) are agreements between organizations to combine resources and provide excellent services to their clients. The idea behind SS is to share some common (not core) elements in their organizations. One of the most critical challenges of the SS paradigm is how to integrate for instance routine administrative activities such as information-data systems to a SSC in such a way that different organizations can suitably interact with each other by sharing activities, processes services etc. This integration essentially create pull of economies of scale such as reducing time dedicated to bureaucratic processes by clients, increases quality of services delivery, allows sharing of knowledge, information and best practices. OCSS is an SSC that provides the fundamental drivers for * Corresponding author: nallumi@yahoo.com (Nura Abubakar Allumi) Published online at http://journal.sapub.org/hrmr Copyright © 2012 Scientific & Academic Publishing. All Rights Reserved shaping public service delivery and organisational development in this digital era. These drivers can be summed up as – disintermediation – which means the stripping out, slimming down or simplification of intermediaries (duplication) in the process of delivering public services. Disintermediation achieves ‘joining-up’ by significantly and visibly reducing the bureaucratic complexity of the public institutions which citizens are confronted with in trying to access public services (Dunleavy,[1]). However, establishing an SSC requires considerable involvement of ICT resources that can be unsustainable in terms of cost and maintenance especially for small public organizations. Requisite technologies that support an SSC are fundamental to develop a general architecture that integrates all information systems of each organization into one-single- folder designed to facilitate unified clients service delivery. Overall cost reduction was the initial rationale for implementing SSC, but high-performance governments in terms of service delivery now takes a more value-oriented precedence. In a bit to leverage the full potentials of SS as an opportunity to improve public-sector value and transform citizen-centered service delivery, adopting a true SSC operating model requires a dramatic transformation and corporate culture change that address both administrative processes, policies, organizational structure, human resources management and technology. However, many organizations address a few of these components when trying to set up an SSC in achieving economic of scales. Unless all of these components are addressed holistically, the benefits of SSC will not be attained.