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In business, as in politics, ideas can spark revolutions. Within the past decade, best-in-class companies around the world, realizing that they are their own customers, have "brought the market inside," radically transforming internal service delivery and adding tangibly to companies' profitability. Companies have invested effort and capital in achieving competitive General & Administrative (G&A) ... More

In business, as in politics, ideas can spark revolutions. Within the past decade, best-in-class companies around the world, realizing that they are their own customers, have "brought the market inside," radically transforming internal service delivery and adding tangibly to companies' profitability. Companies have invested effort and capital in achieving competitive General & Administrative (G&A) cost structures, by consolidating decentralized and sub-scale services into shared service centers, applying six-sigma process redesign discipline to dramatically reduce process complexity, integrating and rationalizing back-office technology platforms, outsourcing back-office and IT operations, sharing internal G&A best practices across business units, and off-shoring transaction-based processes.
But rare is the revolution that succeeds overnight. For almost all companies, significant challenges remain in improving the cost-effectiveness of internal services - especially now, with a persistently sluggish economy in the industrialized world forcing firms to become more aggressively competitive than they ever thought possible. Even a decade into the customer-focused transformation of internal services, companies still approach the challenge with a supply-side mind-set. Unenlightened managers continue to think of these services simply as overhead, and seek to provide them at the lowest cost possible. Senior executives need a comprehensive, broader, and more enlightened approach that recognizes internal services as crucial enablers of business-unit performance.
Making Overhead Outperform: How to Attain Next-Generation G&A Performance is a guidebook to this revolution. A collection of articles based on research, case studies, and client work by Booz Allen Hamilton, the global strategy and technology consulting firm, this book is designed to help executives develop practical ways to use market mechanisms to lower the cost and enhance the effectiveness of their firms' internal services. Several of the articles first appeared in strategy+business, the quarterly management journal. Other pieces have previously been available only to Booz Allen clients and have been adapted specifically for this book.
To make the reader's journey as fulfilling as possible, this s+b Reader is divided into three sections: Part I, Focusing on the Best, describes how companies can identify their fields of functional competitive advantage and learn to move outside the firm those functions in which they probably cannot excel. Part II, Outside-In G&A, provides senior executives a new way to think about "overhead" services, explaining how to use "customer-back" approaches and market mechanisms to continually improve the G&A functions that remain inside the firm. Part III, The Evolution of Shared Services, is a primer on the most important advance in next-generation G&A thinking from the past several years - the development of organizing structures and processes that enable internal functions to operate as companies-within-a-company.

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