Here at BMC something like 35% of our business applications are now consumed from SaaS vendors. Critical functions such as Sales, Marketing and HR all benefit from using state-of-the-art solutions that are hosted, managed and constantly improved by a third party. This genuinely has led to the promised gains in efficiency and reductions in cost for IT – but what has it meant for how we plan, deploy and monitor the health and effectiveness of those applications?
IT has to respond to an environment where:
- The requirements of the critical systems the company uses are almost exclusively criteria set by the consuming business function.
- Just to add extra excitement – the above criteria shift quickly and regularly as the business evolves and changes in response to the market is serves.
- The evaluation and selection of application vendors is driven largely by the business function – where IT’s input is now but one part of a balanced assessment.
- Someone else owns the systems and infrastructure on which these applications will reside.
- Someone else owns the connectivity between your organization and those critical business applications.
- Someone else is responsible for the security and integrity of business critical information that you once owned and protected.
- Processes for managing and delivering SaaS applications must co-exist with more traditional approaches to managing the infrastructure you still own.
- You, as the organizations IT department, are still the single point of contact for all of the above.
Tricky… as Douglas Adam’s fictional all knowing computer ‘Deep Thought’ once responded – but highly achievable, provided IT views itself more as a broker and manager of services – and reviews its skills, processes and systems accordingly.
We’ll focus in on three of the promises of SaaS and practical things IT can do to help ensure that those promises are kept.
By: Chris Rixon