John Madden, practice director, enterprise services strategies at Summit Strategies said that in the past HP never had offerings like this and the fact that it developed its own proprietary methodology and tools for shared services is significant.

"The thrust is around planning and a shared service road map, but they are leaning on their infrastructure expertise," said Madden.

According to Madden, changing IT over to a shared service model is not an easy task, requiring changes in business processes, infrastructure, and how business and IT personnel in an organization work together.

The end result, however, should be greater degree of flexibility in instituting business changes, more manageable costs and greater control.

Shared services also holds the promise of increasing the enterprise's ability to integrate data across separate application silos.