Central (or enabling) functions
Functions that are mission critical to the enterprise (research & development,
engineering and product management, manufacturing, sales, service delivery, support,
marketing, human resources) may be distributed for maximal effectiveness and usually
reside as near as is cost justified to their logical area of deployment or client interface.
Apart from those, there are a number of enabling groups, that provide essential services
to the company as a whole, but are not directly part of the value chain. They typically
are located centrally in HQ- environments , and may be managed under the
organisational Operations banner. Examples are:
Finance & Administration
Usually consisting of accounting, business finance, credit and collection, treasury,
controllership and financial management. F&A quite often is considered an independent
function and in some companies Operations itself is subsumed under F&A.
Law
The group reporting to and including the legal counsel. Typical responsibilities:
corporate law, terms of trade, intellectual property rights, contract and civil law,
litigation. They may reside within Operations, within F&A, or be positioned as a
separate function.
Company secretariat
In charge of private and public regulatory compliance. Often also operates as a general
support resource to the CEO, CFO, general manager or senior leadership team.
Back-office groups
Specialist groups directly supporting value-chain functions, but not part of the field
organisation. Typical examples are call centres (inbound (support) and outbound (direct
sales)), online help-desks, distribution and logistics centres, procurement and supply
chain management groups.
Quality Management organisation
May be distributed and embedded, but has to be strictly autonomous and independent
of the field organisation. Members: quality manager(s), quality representatives, quality
delegates, quality assessors.
My contribution
The architecture, set-up and implementation of the central groups tends to be a
recurring process, initialised at some point on the enterprise growth curve. My practice
is geared to accept all responsibility senior leadership elects to delegate in this respect.
Furthermore, in many cases it makes sense to establish central groups, but outsource
their management (e.g. to provide useful coaching and thus create a headstart)
Last but not least, some of these task sets may not (yet) have reached sufficient critical
mass for dedicated resource allocation, in which case I offer my expertise for selective
outtasking.
