For many organisations and business leaders, 2021 is set to be the year of recovery, pathfinding for the new normal and institutionalise the good practices we have learned on resilience and agility from the global pandemic crisis. For GBS and Shared Services leaders, not only does the above ring particularly true, it is also a year requiring a massive step up. More than ever, GBS needs to step up in so many different ways: leading back office integration, championing digital transformation, incubating innovation to fuel organisational transformation, whilst continue to find new ways of delivering value.

Many new trends have emerged as well: developing and managing virtual and remote service centres, orchestrating the future of hybrid operating model, furthering the journey of data visualisation, and more importantly becoming the catalyst and the integral part of the organisational growth narrative.