Structural models answer a different question from service models: not who decides, but how HR work is grouped so transactional, consultative and specialist work stop competing with each other.
The four models
The BASK names exactly four: center of excellence, shared services, business partners, matrix.
- Shared services: high-volume transactional work consolidated in one internal unit serving all business lines, typically through a single intake queue. Benefits enrollment support, employment verifications, payroll inquiries.
- Center of excellence: a small concentrated team of deep specialists in one discipline advising the whole enterprise. Compensation specialists designing pay structures and advising every division on job evaluation and market pricing.
- Business partner: an HR professional embedded with a business unit full time, attending its leadership meetings and translating unit goals into workforce plans, drawing on corporate specialists as needed.
- Matrix: dual reporting. A country HR manager reports to the country general manager for day-to-day priorities and to the global HR VP for professional standards. The defining feature is the split reporting line, not embedment.
The traps
- Centralized, decentralized and global resources are service models, not structural models. A list that includes outsourcing alongside the service models is mismatched twice.
- A business partner and a matrixed country HR manager can look alike in a scenario. Read for dual reporting: if operational and functional accountability are split between two bosses, it is matrix.
- Shared services and center of excellence both consolidate, but shared services absorbs routine volume and a center of excellence holds specialized design work.
The judgment pattern
When HR is one undifferentiated generalist pool that is both slow on transactions and absent from restructuring decisions, the effective move is to redesign delivery: transactions to shared services, business partners supporting division decisions, centers of excellence holding specialist design work.
The models exist precisely to separate transactional delivery from consultative and specialist work. Adding generalists funds the flawed design. Written request queues manage symptoms. Dispersing everyone into divisions recreates the same competition inside each division.
Carry this: one pool doing everything is the diagnosis, not the fix.