Impact on your Internal IT Dept.

What does the SaaS and Cloud computing mean for your internal Information Technology (IT) Departments

SaaS offers substantial opportunities for organizations of all sizes to shift the risks of software acquisition, and to move their internal Information Technology (IT) department and staff from a reactive cost center to being a proactive, value-producing part of the enterprise. IT professionals often see business units as being afraid of change, but IT departments are not immune to organizational politics, either, and often resistance to SaaS can come from IT itself.

Successful Chief Information Officers (CIO) and their teams engage with business units, educate them about the impact of certain purchases on their future agility, and work with them to determine whether their needs would be best met by on-premise software, SaaS, or a combination. By performing this consulting role, the IT department can add value directly to the business by matching up business units optimally with technology. SaaS has the potential to transform the way IT departments think about their role as providers of computing services. The emergence of SaaS creates an opportunity for IT departments to shift their focus from deploying and supporting applications to managing the services that those applications provide. A successful service-centric IT department will therefore directly produces more value for the business by providing services that draw from both internal and external sources and align closely with business goals.

With SaaS, the job of deploying an application and keeping it running from day to day (testing and installing patches, managing upgrades, monitoring performance, ensuring high availability, etc. ) is handled by the SaaS provider. By transferring the responsibility for these activities to a third party, the IT department can focus more on other activities that align with and support the business goals of the enterprise. Instead of being primarily reactive and operations-focused, the CIO and IT staff members can more effectively function as technology strategists, working with business units to understand business needs and advise their coworkers on how best to use technology to accomplish their business objectives. So contrary to the fears of many IT departments, after moving to a SaaS model they will not be obsolete, they will instead have the opportunity to contribute to the success of the organization more directly than before.