of 20% or greater from their SSOs. At NASA, the 2006 switch to a shared services model is realizing nearly $20 million of savings annually. Further, by the end of 2015, the NASA Shared Services Center is expected to save the organization a total of over $200 million, according to NASA's Director of Service Delivery. A large-scale cultural and process transformation can be a key component of a move to shared services and may include redundancies and changes of work practices. It is claimed that transformation often results in a better quality of work life for employees although there are few case studies to back this up . Shared services are more than just centralization or consolidation of similar activities in one location. Shared services can mean running these service activities like a business and delivering services to internal customers at a cost, quality, and timeliness that is competitive with alternatives. Commercial structures A shared service can take a variety of different commercial structures. The basic commercial structures include: Unitary A single organization consolidating and centralizing a business service Lead department: An organization consolidating and centralizing a business service that will be shared by other organizations Joint initiatives Agreement between two or more organizations to set up and operate shared services Location variations It is sometimes argued that there are three basic location variations for a shared service including: On-shore Work is carried out in the same country but at a different location Near-shore Work is carried out in a close location (e.g. continental Europe relative to the UK) Off-shore Work is carried out anywhere in the world that is not on-shore or near-shore This is not just to take advantage of wage arbitrage but to appreciate the talents of particular economies in delivering specific service offerings. The difficulty with this argument is that near-shore and off-shore are normally associated with the outsourcing model and are difficult to reconcile with the notion of an internally shared service as distinct from an externally purchased service. Clearly, the use of off-shore facilities by a government department is not an example of shared services. Benchmarking and measurement In establishing and running a shared service, benchmarking and measurement is considered by some as a necessity. Benchmarking is the comparison of the service provision usually against best in class. The measurement occurs by using agreed key performance indicators (KPIs). Although the amount of KPIs chosen