Section 6: Ohio Shared Services Survey A Shared Services Survey was sent to 5,867 local government and school leaders including Ohio’s school districts, chartered non-public schools and local political subdivisions. The 15-question survey was provided to the stakeholder associations to inventory the current state of shared services in 91 different topic areas and collected information on the future of shared services. Of these examples, 1,789 completed the survey, for a 30.5 percent rate of return. The deliverables team analyzed the survey data to develop recommendations for this plan. Because there are differing opinions as to how the term shared services is applied, the Shared Services Survey and model identified broad categories of shared services opportunities and almost 100 shared services examples that represent thousands of ongoing collaborations across Ohio. Shared services opportunities exist not only in back-office functions such as administration, purchasing, human resources, payroll and benefits, insurance pooling and information technology, but also in public service delivery such as public safety, public works, educational services, and health and human services. Beyond the examples of shared core technology, purchasing and instructional support services, the rate of shared services adoption by survey respondents often is 10 percent or lower. In summary, the survey indicates that schools and local government in Ohio have begun to utilize shared services as an approach to cost saving and efficiencies, but they are not utilizing the strategy across the board or to an extent that significant savings or service delivery improvements have been achieved. Below, the “reported shared services utilization table� provides a more detailed view of the utilization of shared services by specific types of entities. Again, these data are only reflective of the information provided by the 1,789 respondents to the survey. However, nothing would suggest utilization rates are higher by those who did not respond. In fact, it may be a safe assumption that those most interested in shared services responded to the survey and rates of utilization among the remaining entities may be lower.
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