Interview with Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Fischer (Chair of Accounting and Management Control) on the future roles of shared service organizations (SSOs) in “Siemens GBS Inside”
In order to stay competitive, firms need to respond to megatrends like digitalization, demographic change, decarbonization, and deglobalization. Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Fischer, holder of the Chair of Accounting and Management Control at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and head of the “Shared Services” working group at the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft e.V., discusses how this can be done successfully.
In this interview, he speaks about the contribution that SSOs make as “incubators” and as a “nucleus for innovation”. SSOs increasingly expand their service portfolio from increasing the cost efficiency of firms’ existing processes to leveraging the internal process knowledge and data availability, so as to enable value-added services. Accordingly, SSOs become key in overall value creation and, in the best-case scenario, the nucleus for innovation and sustainable development of a firm. Prof. Dr. Thomas M. Fischer further outlines the relevance of SSOs in monitoring novel performance metrics in the context of sustainability and potential risks emerging from generative AI.
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