There are always dozens of reasons not to do something – go live with a project, stand up and say “The King is not wearing any clothes” and so on (Shared IT is set to support frontline services).

Shared services often require a mindset change to encourage the “experts” – the managers who deal with the everyday issues – to begin collaborating with peers in different organisations to look for similarities rather than differences.

A key question is to ask whether the senior management team of an institution will encourage and then actively support their middle managers to suggest that many sacred cows should be offloaded to the abattoir. Or perhaps I have mixed my metaphors too much.

Paul Hopkins