Drive Resilience with Software-as-a-Service: Save Cost and Increase Agility

Align the business strategy. Companies embarking on a SaaS journey often fail to define what will be different when the new technology is deployed. A SaaS migration should spur significant changes in everything from customer interaction to internal workflows and information management. This will mean changes to your infrastructure needs, your technical support model, your contracts and, most importantly, the way users engage and conduct work. Self-service functionality increases availability and control, but it also can shift work from centralized processing hubs to end users. SaaS provides the ability to accelerate deployment of new functionality. Take time to think through how this aligns with your operational strategies.

Define the business case. Business cases for SaaS often fail to account for the true costs of migration and the necessary work involved in sunsetting legacy systems. Consider how you will decommission older technology and its associated support. Determine if costs for new SaaS subscriptions align with retiring costs of software maintenance. Account for potential costs related to schedule slippage or changes in requirements. And be sure to incorporate into the business case a realistic deployment plan, including data conversion, integration rationalization and process redesign, along with necessary internal and external resources. Think broadly about potential benefits of SaaS deployment – including increased revenues due to faster product rollouts, data-based production decisions, better use of resources or improved workforce planning – and budget what is necessary to enable these benefits. Some SaaS vendors offer business case models that account for many of the features and benefits of the products, but don’t let this oversimplify your thinking about the internal costs and dependencies you are likely to face. Be sure to account for testing the new solution, sunsetting the old, creating new business processes, driving organizational change management and re-skilling staff.

Align dependencies across your independent software vendor (ISV), systems integrator (SI) and application management services (AMS) providers. Companies frequently solve for each major component of a SaaS deployment without an understanding of the interdependencies between the involved parties or the sales tactics at play. A quick glance at any ISV or SI website will list “partnerships,” which are thinly veiled market incentives that maximize their respective revenues and lock in clients for long-term single source relationships. The truth is, partner-recommended solution architectures are often engineered to de-risk the SI’s accountabilities and maximize the products that help the ISV penetrate new markets. By understanding the dependencies and the component transaction streams between all the players, companies can reduce the total cost of the solution by 20 percent or more. Remember that migrating your core business systems to SaaS is a strategic move that requires well-informed, data-based decisions. More agile, collaborative, solution-based methodologies such as ISG FutureSource™ can accelerate your evaluation process and provide you the market insights and data you need to understand key supplier and product-specific commercial risks and technical dependencies.

Reinvent your business processes. In migrating to SaaS applications your goal should be to modernize the delivery of your business services to end users, which includes simplifying and automating workflows, integrating strategic partners and unleashing the power of data into management dashboards. It requires following through on and refining the objectives that were part of the business strategy. The true value of SaaS is achieved only when processes, organization structures and job profiles are redesigned to take advantage of the functionality and accessibility provided by cloud technologies. Apply advances occurring elsewhere to your environment. ISVs leverage user communities, for example, to drive a regular stream of enhancements. The pace of transformation needs to be fast, and Agile approaches that incorporate design thinking and other techniques will be critical.

Manage the transformation to realize value. If your business case is thorough and budgeted correctly, you have earmarked sufficient funding to cover the critical tasks of program management, process transformation, organizational change, training and communication to best leverage SaaS technology. Establishing strong governance across workstreams and resourcing your program with your best talent are two of the most important things you can do to deliver on time and on budget. Build a transformation management office that connects workstreams, including software deployment, testing, process re-design, delivery model changes and organizational change management. This work will help to identify critical dependencies, mitigate risks for the whole project and avoid costly surprises. Relatively small investments here will pay major dividends by avoiding project overruns that can range from 25-75 percent or more of the budget.