Public Sector Shared Services Move Out of the “Back-Office”: The Role of Public Policy and Mission Criticality Arthur P. Tomasino Florida Gulf Coast University Jane Fedorowicz Bentley University Christine B. Williams Bentley University Acknowledgments We thank the individuals from CapWIN and Clermont County who gave generously of their time to participate in the many interviews we conducted. We appreciate the input and support of the Public Safety Networks Project team. This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants NSF-0852688 and NSF-0534877. Abstract Shared service providers typically host routine and administrative business processes as a way to standardize company practices and increase efficiency. In the public sector, however, its application to functions critical to an organization’s central mission is moving shared services out of the “back-office.” This research employs and extends Bergeron’s (2003) framework to case analysis of two public safety networks within the United States, and prompts the addition of two new characteristics for public sector shared services, Public Policy and Type of Service. In this sector, we find that legislative controls, i.e. policy, manage information and communications technology (ICT) investment to meet efficiency and especially effectiveness goals, while mission criticality serves to trump cost considerations. Recommendations resulting from this research should lead to improvements in the cost and performance of public- sector shared services and their role in ICT-supported, mission-critical, shared services. Keywords: Shared Services; Public Policy; Mission Critical; Bergeron Framework Introduction Although shared service centers (SSCs) have been in operation for many years, they have been slow to evolve beyond their original purview in the private sector where they host standardized access to a company’s well-structured, commoditized, administrative (“back-office”) processes. Because of their corporate origin, most research on SSCs focuses on their use in the private sector, as governments have been slower to adopt alternatives to in-house service provision. Also, centers consolidating front- office or mission-critical processes are rarely seen. Our goal in this research is to suggest and evaluate a framework for deploying public sector (including mission-critical) services given SSCs are a new and growing phenomenon in this setting. In general, shared service is a collaborative strategy intended to improve service quality and efficiency, generate value, and reduce costs (Bergeron, 2003). Within an SSC these servicesencompass both the offloaded processes and the underlying information and communications technology (ICT) typically supporting the back-office, meaning the administrative and routine tasks within a business unit. The processes are shared (and as a result, commoditized) to prevent distracting the organization from its core business goals (Ulrich, 1995). Companies find it most effective to adopt a shared services organizational structure supporting their back office (Janssen & Joha, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems 83 Volume 48, Number 3, August 2017