Governments are seeking ways to improve the service provisioning to their citizens by using the Internet, whilst at the same time reducing the operational costs in their back-office and IT. The implementation of shared service centers (SSCs) is claimed to be a valuable organizational redesign that will lead to less redundancy in operations, less staff and more concentrated knowledge accumulation. However, the decision-making and subsequent implementation of such SSCs is a complex task full of risks of failure. This is partly due to diverse expectations and interests among the actors involved. Triggered by the failure of a major shared service center for Human Resource Management within the Dutch central government (P-Direct), this chapter discusses in depth the risks involved and the dilemmas faced in the design and implementation of SSCs. There are various scenarios which can be thought of for decision-making on and implementation of SSCs. They lie in the spectrum from central top-down steering to bottom-up emergent process growth. The authors propose a framework for strategic choice that may be of guidance in the search for a successful implementation strategy, and that may help future empirical research in developing ‘best practices’.