SmartSuite for the Shared Services Director

HR Requests & Case Management, Legal Requests & Intake and facilities requests sit behind a single employee portal with standardized intake forms, so an employee has one place to ask and each domain team receives a case that is already complete.

The Service Catalog defines each service, its owner, its intake form and its approval path, so adding a new HR or finance service is a catalog entry rather than a project. Scalable catalogs support multiple locations, divisions and service models.

Multi-step approvals carry finance, legal and policy sign-offs inside the workflow, so a request that needs the Controller's approval or privileged legal handling follows the route the policy requires. The decision history stays on the case.

Service Level Management (SLAs) sets response and resolution targets for each service and domain team, tracks escalations and overdue items consistently and shows attainment by team. The Service Desk Manager runs to the same targets you set.

Role-based permissions protect sensitive HR, legal and finance data within the shared portal, so the HR Operations Manager's cases and the Legal Operations Manager's privileged intake are visible only to the teams entitled to see them.

Shared service governance applies one standard for intake, status and SLAs while each domain keeps the workflow steps its work needs, so the IT Service Manager's desk and the Facilities Director's team run differently inside the same model.

Service performance dashboards show backlog volume, trends, SLA attainment and satisfaction, with cross-department reporting on bottlenecks, staffing gaps and demand, so the COO and CIO read each service's demand and performance from the cases themselves, beside the service costs you track, with the AI Assistant drafting the summary.

Scalable service catalogs let you move HR, then finance, then legal and facilities into the portal in sequence, each with its own forms and SLAs, without rebuilding what the first function set up. No-code changes keep pace as each team joins.

Audit trails and decision history on every approval, change and action give the Controller and external auditors the SOX approval evidence and SOC 1 support that a center running controls for other entities has to provide. Nothing is reconstructed at audit time.

Chief Operating Officer

The Shared Services Director is accountable for enterprise service delivery to employees: the enterprise service management strategy and the service catalog, the service standards and SLAs for HR, finance, legal and facilities, one intake and case management model across those functions, governance of the domain service teams and resolver groups, employee satisfaction and the cost of each service, and the reporting of enterprise service performance to executives. They own the program that makes internal functions feel like one service.

Service Desk & Request Portal provides one employee portal for HR, finance, legal and facilities requests with routing, approvals and case tracking, so an employee asks in one place and the request is routed to the HR Operations Manager's team, the Legal Operations Manager's intake or the Facilities Director's group by rule. HR Requests & Case Management and Legal Requests & Intake handle the domain-specific case work behind the portal. The Shared Services Director sees every function's queue in one model.

Service Level Management (SLAs) sets and measures SLAs per service and domain team, so a payroll query, a contract request and a desk move each carry their own target and the domain team that owns it is measured against it. Service Catalog defines the services and what each promises. The Shared Services Director governs the domain teams from attainment by service rather than from anecdote, which is the basis for the service standards the role sets.

SmartSuite maintains self-service knowledge for internal services, so the answers to the questions that fill HR and finance queues, such as how to claim an expense or change a benefit, are published where employees look before they raise a case. The Shared Services Director can see which services generate repeat requests and direct the domain teams to write the article. Volume for those services falls as the knowledge improves, and the Service Desk Manager's team handles what remains.

SmartSuite reports volumes, SLA attainment, satisfaction and demand by service to executives, so the Shared Services Director's report to the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Information Officer shows each service's demand, performance against its SLA and employee satisfaction drawn from the case records, with the cost to deliver each service set beside them. Cost per service is the figure that justifies the shared services model, and the Controller can read the same numbers for the finance services the center runs.

One function at a time, usually starting with the domain whose request volume is highest or whose intake is most scattered; the portal, routing rules and SLAs for that function are set up, its cases opened in the portal and its knowledge published, before the next function follows. The Service Desk Manager runs the front line throughout. Getting started needs the service catalog as it stands, each function's request types and approvers and the SLA targets agreed with the domain leads.

Each domain brings its own rules, and the case record is where they are evidenced: HR cases carry employment law and, where benefits data is involved, HIPAA; finance requests carry SOX approval controls; legal intake carries privilege. Because approvals and routing are recorded on every case in the one intake model, the Shared Services Director can show an auditor how a request was approved and who handled it, which is what a SOC 1 report on the center's controls asks for.