What is Soft Pressure

This chapter presents a set of critical choices for initiating a Shared Service Center (SSC) in a large public organization and the management of the transformation process towards it. A move to concentratingorganizational support functions in SSCs in public administration is encouraged by successes in the private sector. There is a lot to gain by concentrating functions including improved services through specialization, efficiencies through standardization, and cost reductions through economies of scale. Yet the transformation process does not resemble the simplicity of the concept of SSC and many challenges need to be bridged. In this chapter, the complexities of transformation processes of the introduction of a government wide SSC for human resource management are studied. By analyzing the perceptions of key stakeholders from a policy network theoretical lens, we found some major patterns determining success or failure in both designing and implementing SSCs. By listing these, we aim to clarify the complexities of transformation processes towards SSCs in public administration and provide some strategic suggestions for these transformations.