People often ask how Global Business Services (GBS) differs from Shared Services. GBS is an evolution of the Shared Services model.
Traditionally, the Shared Services support model provides services across countries or geographies within a single functional department, whereas the evolved GBS model brings together these functional shared services into a single organization structure that extends the capabilities of an organization with the aim to drive further optimization.
Most larger organizations have implemented Shared Services for their main support services (e.g. IT, HR) in order to save cost and improve performance by sharing resources and standardizing processes across countries, regions or geographies.
Where there is sufficient size and scale, some organizations establish Global Business Services (GBS) delivery organizations to centralize large numbers of services and optimize the resource, supplier and technology needs.