Shared Service Organizations (SSOs) have long focused on performing repetitive, routine tasks most efficiently. More recently, robotic process automation (RPA) has reinforced a trend towards more complex, innovative, and transformational tasks as traditional tasks become automated. Drawing on interviews in various SSOs, we adopt an ambidexterity perspective to analyze how this shift plays out as, in various ways, routine and non-routine tasks are performed simultaneously, at least during the transition period. We find two modes of how explorative and exploitative tasks are organized, each with different implications for skill and talent management requirements. Work in SSOs is, in several cases, getting professionalized, making SSOs relevant to the literature on talent management in professional service firms (PSFs).
