Risk, legal, HR and compliance are critical to business operations. Yet all too often they’re also seen as cost centers that don’t earn their keep, and not value generators in their own right. In this article I argue that with one change enterprises can flip that narrative, turning corporate services into slicker, more productive business units that are also capable of making a valuable strategic contribution to business success.
What would your business do to reduce costs and risks, and to gain sharper real-time operational insights that improve decision making? And would you at the same time like to boost the productivity and efficiency of the legal, HR, risk and compliance departments? All these benefits are within grasp if businesses make one change. By adopting the right type of business system, you can both improve the performance of corporate service teams and gain the ability to exploit corporate services’ unique position within the business to drive better overall value creation.
Why does corporate services performance need to improve in the first place? Well, it doesn’t help that legal, HR, risk and compliance are all cost centers. In a fiercely competitive environment, this exposes them to being squeezed in all sorts of ways: hiring freezes; flat or declining budgets; and even the threat of shared services outsourcing. Worryingly, research conducted globally by KPMG uncovered that less than one third of senior executives surveyed felt their corporate service teams delivered ‘high quality’ services. Moreover, these leaders' top priority was cutting costs and driving efficiencies.
Meanwhile, many corporate service teams are also being pushed to expand their workload, for instance taking on responsibilities that are part of the business’s ESG agenda. Plus, there’s the need to adapt to an ever more complicated regulatory environment. PwC found that 85% of respondents to its 2025 Global Compliance survey saw a rise in the complexity of compliance requirements over the past three years. This takes a toll, with senior compliance management needing to give it more of their attention across legal, HR, risk and compliance. Finite resources are being stretched further. It underlines that the pressure to do more with less isn’t letting up.
Relatedly, we’re seeing the emergence of ‘GC+’ roles, which expand the general counsel’s remit to include non-traditional areas such as policy, communications and public affairs. It’s a direction of travel that heralds a broader push to increase the alignment between corporate services functions and business strategy.
A different piece of KPMG research amplifies this, with 79% of respondents agreeing that silos obstruct value delivery to customers. At the same time, only one in three business leaders describe their corporate services functions as ‘highly connected ’, and 64% believe that connected and collaborative corporate services would have a positive effect on operational efficiency. This creates additional pressure on corporate services to shift from traditional, stand-alone functions to something more integrated and better able to deliver strategic value.
Under this sustained pressure, corporate services will have to respond with energy and innovation. Acquiring systems that can deliver Operational Intelligence will be a great place to start. By ‘Operational Intelligence’, I simply mean capturing everything that’s happening and arranging the information more clearly, so it can be easily and quickly understood, prioritized and acted upon in achieving the organization’s objectives. Many strong benefits flow from this.
I’m thinking of a system that’s capable of logging how much work is coming in; where it’s come from; who’s doing the work; the stage and status of the work; and if there are any risks hidden in the work. This data can be organized and surfaced in real-time dashboards that make the information clear and actionable. As a result, leaders can quickly identify workflow blockages and bottlenecks and address them. They can ensure work allocations are optimized and tweak them as needed. They can see if projects are on track to deliver and they can intervene in good time if they’re not.
In addition – and this is key – because corporate service teams operate at the inflection points of most business processes, they also have a uniquely close and detailed ‘view’ of operational activity. When you think about it, corporate services are right there when the workforce is growing or contracting; or the business is involved in restructuring; or in new supplier onboarding; in implementing major regulatory changes or new contracts; in shepherding mergers, acquisitions and divestments; or in dispute handling. And the list goes on.
Given this proximity to the action, the right Operational Intelligence systems don’t only surface data, they also structure that data in the context of what the business is trying to achieve. In this way corporate services’ Operational Intelligence can integrate what corporate service teams are doing into the wider activities of the business, enabling legal, HR, compliance and risk functions to anticipate business needs more quickly and respond more nimbly to business requirements, including with much less back and forth between the operational unit and the corporate services function.
The right systems also provide corporate service teams with work product management. In effect, a golden thread is connecting data to operations, giving GCs, Group Risk Officers and Heads of HR and Compliance actionable insights that also reflect established business priorities. It means that outputs from the system, such as compliance team filings and reports, audit assessments, HR manager overviews on status of roles being filled, risk manager overviews of risk registers, mitigation plans, and so on, are also generated in alignment with business priorities.
And finally, the right Operational Intelligence systems can be programmed to be bespoke to each corporate services department, using language and workflows appropriate to each individual discipline, whether that’s law, HR or risk or compliance management.
Operational Intelligence can transform the work of corporate service teams. With the right systems, they gain clarity, visibility and control that enables improved productivity and efficiency. They gain insights that lead to smarter, more timely decision making and reduced risk. Operations can be streamlined and costs reduced, and the business can enjoy more aligned and faster service delivery from corporate service teams. It takes much of the pressure off corporate services because they can now meet insistent demands to do more in less time with fewer resources.
But more than that. Operational Intelligence systems will be a huge help to corporate service teams that want to move closer to the integrated model that business leaders are looking for. They will be more capable of reflecting and supporting the business’s strategic priorities in timelier ways; they will become strategic enablers who remove friction, decrease time to market, anticipate and remove blockers, optimize processes, improve decision making, drive transformation, protect brand and reputation and strengthen resilience. This changes the narrative and introduces a whole new era for corporate services.
Co-Flo software embeds Operational Intelligence in iManage to bring clarity and efficiency to corporate services’ operations.