About Us

History

The shared services concept at Montana State arose from the OpenMSU initiative, and identified opportunities to share administrative functions in order to improve information sharing, training and operational efficiency. An initial phase of Fiscal Shared Services that consisted of three pilots began in spring 2015. The pilot groups — College of Engineering, College of Letters and Science, and Administrative Services — each optimized ways to deliver fiscal services; this gave their client departments the ability to focus more on services essential to their core mission and less on fiscal tasks.

FSS Task Force

Based on the successes and lessons learned by these initial pilot groups, a Fiscal Shared Services Task Force was created and charged with building the structural framework for Fiscal Shared Services for the entire campus. The Task Force stressed that Shared Services should be “home grown” and driven from the department level to make certain that changes add value to the departments.

FSS Implementation

In the Spring of 2019, the Director & Branch Managers began implementing the Fiscal Shared Services model and established our three tenets of service and a phased approach to FSS core services.