1. Time to value
Taking advantage of a pre-built and pre-configured best practice application environment should mean that you are able to enjoy the business benefits of the application more quickly and with less effort and expenditure in the process. There’s a much reduced testing, staging and go-live cycle – someone else has already made sure that everything is installed and working correctly – just as they have done for tens of thousands of other organizations in some cases.
The process of configuring and aligning the solution to your needs is a well rehearsed drill – where many of the kinks and known traps have been ironed out or at least well signposted. To give you a feel for what the vendors scale and experience brings to the situation, imagine you were going through your ERP roll-out for the seven thousandth time – no matter what variations you added on this occasion – chances are it would still be a pretty slick and rapid affair.
However, the watchword in realizing the undoubted benefits of such a well-oiled machine is ‘readiness’ – you, as an IT organization, have to play an active part in ensuring that the resources and information needed to expedite this transition are in place and that your part of the execution will happen in a controlled and documented way.
Tips for IT: Get very familiar with your SaaS vendors’ on-boarding process early, preferably as part of the selection phase. Look carefully at its completeness in terms of information, roles, processes and timings – be vigilant for any gaps or requirements that you know will be a challenge in your environment.
Make sure any data you need to supply can be readily extracted, transformed and loaded into the application. Make sure all the internal stakeholders in the project know about what needs to happen, their role in the on-boarding process and the information they’ll need to supply.
This is an IT Change Management exercise similar to most others – but with the added complication of a greater number of external parties involved. With these additional dimensions, you need to get really sharp at using change management best practices and highly disciplined about using change management software. Make sure you encode the roles and steps documented in your vendor’s on-boarding process into the structure of the change requests and work-orders you manage for this project.
2. Lower TCO
So, you no longer own the infrastructure on which the applications run, you didn’t have to buy it and invest large capital sums doing so. Experts employed by your supplier are ensuring the system continues to do what it’s supposed to – they’re also worrying, on your behalf, about whether it needs to run on newer and faster hardware. Your supplier is enjoying the economies of scale in terms of powering, cooling and managing the application infrastructures of lots of companies like yours in the most efficient hardware configuration they can – and passing that saving on to you, so that they can remain competitive.
You’re not juggling complex and inflexible licensing agreements, you’re likely consuming the service on a utilization basis and so by definition are not over licensed – and therefore not spending lots of time and effort trying to find, account for and reconcile vast number of licenses.
It’s not hard to understand why organizations genuinely do enjoy a reduced TCO from the adoption of SaaS applications – but you don’t get off that easily – you as an IT function have a critical role in ensuring that the reduction in TCO is deep and sustained. You have to learn how to monitor and respond to an environment where your users are consuming a business critical application from a third party – you will still be the first port of call in any outage, request or problem – and as such you’ll need to get good at navigating your new world of dependencies, suppliers and integrations.
Tips for IT:
Service awareness is a term that is creeping into the language surrounding the management of SaaS and cloud based infrastructure. In essence it means that the people, processes and technologies you use to manage your IT infrastructure must be aware of, and able to cope with, the fact that some of the key applications your users depend on are being delivered as a service.
Make sure that Service Level Management process and its supporting software system are able to represent and enforce the relationships between: the SLAs you agreed with the business in supporting the SaaS application – your internal OLAs for handing the relationship between yourselves and the vendor and the Underpinning Contracts (UCs) the vendor has in place in support of that service.
Your Configuration Management processes and underlying database have to be able to model: an application as an external service, the service dependencies and associated service impacts of that application and any integrations to other systems and services – internal and external. Your dreams of lower TCO will soon evaporate if you spend ten hours identifying the location and impact of any problems or the likely impact of a change.
To get proper control over your users’ interactions with, and requests to, your SaaS vendor , Service Request Management (SRM) is a critical discipline. The much vaunted time rapid install and ‘time to value’ claims of SaaS happen to be true – and as a result it’s really easy for departments to sign up and start buying capacity from SaaS vendors. You need to be in complete control of this process and enforce the appropriate steps and controls SRM mandates.
3. Reduced Operational Risk
SaaS vendors spend a great deal of time and effort worrying about systems stability, security and resilience so that you don’t have to. Their capacity to invest in cutting edge systems and facilities to underpin this low risk environment likely outstrips yours – and therefore you should rest as easy as anybody can in this day and age about the relative integrity of the application you’re consuming.
Most SaaS vendors actively promote details of their system performance and integrity processes to help you evaluate them as a supplier and to give you confidence they’re going to take good care of your information and business processes. Some even go as far as live read-out of some of the key performance indicators they track so that you can actually see for yourself how well they’re doing at keeping things performing, stable and secure.
They’ve often invested greatly in pursuing certification in key ISO standards relating to best practice in systems management, compliance and security amongst other disciplines. So, by now you’re probably picking up on a recurring theme here: that is most SaaS vendors generally have their act together and in order to get the best out of SaaS – so should you. The same principle applies to enjoying the peace of mind that comes from consuming a highly risk-mitigated service.
Tip for IT:
Service outages do still occur with SaaS applications for a variety of reasons – some of those reasons lie in new, or at least marginal, territory for many Service Management teams. A good example would be the connectivity between your organization and the SaaS vendor – it’s a complex relationship with multiple resolving parties involved. You need to make sure that your incident management teams, processes and systems understand and document the increased significance of external internet connectivity and the management of the suppliers involved.
Problem investigation and management is another best practice that you’ll need to (re) familiarize yourself with. Your supplier is likely very good at it and will respond best if managed in a controlled and documented way. Get familiar with your vendor’s processes, points of contact and the underpinning contracts they use in support of problem investigation. Bear in mind too, that your users won’t care that you don’t own the teams that are resolving the problem – you might not control the resources, but you do own the problem. Make sure you’re able to communicate updates and expectations widely and clearly .
Your role in systems access management and control doesn’t diminish either, simply because someone else is provisioning and de-provisioning user accounts. To maintain compliance and integrity you need to rigorously enforce process around access and on-boarding requests as part of a concerted effort around Service Request Management .
Next time….
So we’ve familiarized ourselves with some of the benefits and challenges that SaaS adoption has brought for IT departments. What about IT as a service (ITaaS)? What is it? What are its claimed benefits ?and what will then implications be for systems management in this emerging paradigm?
By: Chris Rixon