Shared Services Initiative at the University of Missouri

The University of Missouri has begun its Shared Services Initiative. The purpose of Shared Services is two-fold:

1. It reduces duplication of effort in administrative tasks
2. It increases the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative tasks

As an example, the University of Missouri System hosts our learning management system Blackboard on system servers, but we manage the application at UMKC. This avoids duplication of services—in this case, server management—across our system of campuses. A shared services approach also looks for opportunities to re-allocate resources; money that we would have used on campus-hosted Blackboard servers can pay for additional ILE classrooms instead.

One of our biggest opportunities at UMKC to utilize Shared Services is the partnership between academic units and IT staff for academic unit servers. The IT staff takes care of security patches and operating system upgrades on academic unit servers and the academic units’ staff manages the software. This improves the efficiency of server maintenance as well as overall security.

The concept or goal behind Shared Services is to operate more efficiently and to streamline services so that they are improved and/or more cost effective. Shared Services provides the opportunity for us to partner with other campuses to carry out University business, particularly in the area of procurement.

Shared Services also impacts finance, procurement and human resources. More on this come . . .

Read more about the Shared Services Initiative: http://www.umsystem.edu/ums/president/sharedservices/