The Support Function Imperative
Private and public sector organizations must both worry about market leadership and operational excellence. For private sector, that comes in the form of market share growth, profit margins, and maintaining customer trust and loyalty. For public sector, that comes in the form of meeting mission requirements, demonstrating stewardship of taxpayer resources, and maintaining public trust while avoiding heightened oversight from Congress, GAO, and OIG.
Often dismissed as mere cost centers, support functions represent an overlooked and underleveraged source of efficiency and effectiveness gains for both types of organizations. The scale of the opportunity is significant. Our enterprise-level work with a major federal agency revealed that ~23% of its full-time headcount resided in mission support offices. The private sector is no different. Industry studies estimate support function headcount at similar levels.
Despite their importance, these essential functions often remain trapped in outdated operating models, with loose connections to the rest of the organization, and with rigidly fixed headcounts even as stakeholder-facing functions scale. Those realities severely limit their potential, leading to poor outcomes on their assigned work and frustration across the organization. The symptoms are strikingly similar across industries: HR teams struggle to fill job requisitions and provide strategic workforce planning. Finance departments buried in transaction processing rather than providing forward-looking business insights. IT resources spread thin across maintenance tasks instead of driving digital transformation.
Leading organizations have recognized that excellence in support functions isn't just helpful – it's imperative for competitive advantage and mission delivery.
Outdated support functions aren’t just a self-contained efficiency problem – they are a drain on broader corporate resources and a threat to organizational viability. When support functions operate as fragmented, reactive service providers rather than strategic assets, the resulting costs and effectiveness losses cascade throughout the organization in three critical ways:
Cross-functional Inefficiency: Departments that rely on these support functions fail to deliver on their stakeholders' needs rapidly enough. Those internal stakeholders are then left with a choice to either accept delays and suboptimal outcomes or build shadow capabilities - duplicate efforts, creating redundant processes that drain resources and create inconsistent service delivery. For top-performing organizations, neither response represents a viable option.
Inconsistent Service Delivery: Critical insights and best practices become trapped within individuals and small teams, as these support functions lack the resources needed to identify and implement best practices, preventing the development of institutional knowledge and standardized approaches that could drive enterprise-wide performance improvement and efficiency gains.
Capability Decay: Most critically, support teams get caught in a vicious cycle – experiencing high levels of burnout and turnover, chronic underperformance, and a resulting credibility gap that limits their ability to attract top talent. Those factors limit their ability to course correct through capability building and the implementation of modern tools and processes. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle of underperformance further feeding cross-functional inefficiency and inconsistent service delivery.
Leading organizations have recognized that excellence in support functions isn't just helpful – it's imperative for competitive advantage and mission delivery. They understand that functions like HR, Finance, and IT don't merely "support" the business; they are critical drivers of organizational capabilities that can create meaningful market differentiation. When properly positioned and equipped, these functions deliver services at competitive and continuously improving costs while enabling rapid response to changing market conditions and stakeholder needs. Rather than operating as a drain on resources, they become catalysts for enterprise-wide performance improvement.
While achieving support function excellence requires new operating models, this typically represents an evolution rather than a wholesale reinvention. This is where modern shared services and centers of excellence enter the picture – not as mere cost-cutting exercises, but as a fundamental reimagining of how support functions deliver value. Through the strategic implementation of shared service centers and centers of excellence, organizations transform these functions from reactive service providers into proactive strategic partners that drive enterprise-wide performance improvement.
Over the next ten parts of this series, we'll explore how leading organizations are achieving this transformation, focusing on:
Strategy & Design: How to evaluate and select the right mix of shared services and centers of excellence for your organization's specific needs and context
Implementation Approach: Building on existing structures while driving meaningful change
Innovation & Excellence: Creating the conditions for continuous improvement and capability building
Governance & Sustainability: Establishing the frameworks needed to sustain high performance across both operational and strategic services
Most importantly, we'll demonstrate how this transformation can quickly unlock efficiency gains while building the foundation for long-term competitive advantage in both the private and public sectors.
The stakes are clear: while the cost of complacency is substantial, so too are the possible opportunities. By reimagining support functions as strategic assets that accelerate enterprise-wide performance, organizations can fundamentally change their trajectory - moving from a cycle of underperformance to one of continuous improvement and market leadership.
Contact us to learn more.
