Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Manjunath Bhat, VP analyst at Gartner, Inc.
The adoption of SaaS applications in the digital workplace and digital business initiatives profoundly changes the roles, skills and expectations of IT.
SaaS adoption continues to rise as organizations demand scalable, agile solutions for a range of digital workplace needs. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of organizations will rely solely on SaaS applications for their mission-critical workflows.
IT leaders have a profound opportunity to drive digital disruption with SaaS applications, which are easy to consume and enable business users to bypass IT.
This presents one of the biggest challenges for infrastructure and operations leaders: The ease of procuring and deploying SaaS means that organizations often overlook the underlying complexity of ensuring governance and security without compromising user experience and productivity.
Consequently, IT leaders find themselves at the center of two competing forces in SaaS-dominant environments. On one hand, IT faces business expectations around SaaS such as instant access to contextually relevant data, work from anywhere, consumer-like UX and digital dexterity.
On the other, IT demands an agile operating model to secure and support an environment that is always on, continuously updated and scales as the business grows.
These competing pressures will demand new skills, tools and roles to lead the transition to SaaS. I&O leaders will need to invest in both technology and people-oriented roles and skills within their teams.
To cope with the fundamental shift in operating model due to SaaS adoption, I&O leaders must use a three-pronged approach to drive digital business transformation by proactively adopting SaaS applications, rather than retrospectively adapting to the change.
Reorganize: Appoint new roles
With the adoption of SaaS applications, there is often a misplaced notion that I&O declines in importance. There is some truth to this, if I&O takes a passive role and does not show the value of its services and experience.
The adoption of SaaS applications changes the role of IT, demanding new technology- and people-oriented roles to manage governance and digital experience support.
IT must become more agile and take a product-centric approach to manage the constant stream of updates to SaaS applications. Formalize roles such as product managers to ensure that SaaS products meet ongoing business requirements and drive innovation.
The role of IT also changes to that of a service orchestrator, as opposed to that of a service provider. This allows IT to become nimble and focused on creating business-centric workflows through APIs, as opposed to building services from scratch.
As users access SaaS applications, they get the added benefits of improved digital dexterity. Combined with API-driven workflows, users tend to perform more creative and non-mundane tasks. IT must create dedicated roles to support UX, such as service delivery coordinator and digital experience support manager.
Reskill: A shift toward change management
With the transition to SaaS, IT leaders must rebuild their technical and people-centric skills within their teams. SaaS adoption results in an imbalance between supply and demand for relevant skills, and the acute shortage of SaaS skills compounds the problem.
Gartner predicts that by 2024, 70% of IT organizations will lack the relevant roles, skills and tools to support SaaS-enabled digital transformation.
SaaS applications have different license optimization challenges, frequency of updates and methods of user authentication. IT leaders must build SaaS-specific expertise within their teams to meet three new requirements:
- Cloud infrastructure and perimeterless access: The SaaS delivery model changes the way users access applications, with the endpoint and user identity representing the new perimeter. IT must use the integration between identity and access management and endpoint management solutions to secure SaaS applications. This requires IT operations teams to be involved in managing user identities in addition to endpoint operations.
- Continuous application release cadence: Since SaaS providers release changes at a much faster cadence, I&O teams need to acquire relevant technical skills to automate tests that verify the release and mark it as “safe” for deployment. IT support teams will also need to acquire new knowledge about device platforms and monitoring tools, and familiarize themselves with new authentication methods.
- Subscription-based licensing: SaaS subscription-based pricing alters the IT operating model in that IT must now align funding to maximize business value through enhanced product capabilities. Since SaaS application capabilities change frequently, the funding model must reallocate investments as business priorities change. IT must gain new skills to identify SaaS applications that align to the organization’s most critical business capabilities, determine their relative importance and allocate funding proportionally.
Reskill I&O staff by shifting the focus from managing infrastructure and application availability to change management through collaboration, communication and coordination.
Retool: Enhance governance and user enablement
Although SaaS providers include many security and management components, organizations often decide to use third-party solutions for consistency and visibility.
SaaS applications are inherently network- and device-agnostic and rely on new methods of authentication and authorization which call for specific tools to enable perimeterless work environments.
For example, SaaS management platforms support centralized administration and policy enforcement, role-based access, detection of misconfigurations and data protection. IAM tools enable adaptive access, multifactor authentication, passwordless authentication and single sign-on for SaaS applications.
Unified endpoint management can retrieve device- and app-level trust and enforce security policies to protect data on the endpoint and make context-based access decisions, while software asset management (SAM) tools optimize license costs by gaining visibility into SaaS spend.
Consider deploying such tools to meet IT operations and user enablement needs.
IT teams do not control the performance and availability of SaaS applications, as they control neither the hosting nor the network infrastructure. Thus, it is also important to analyze application response time as perceived by the user.
Workplace analytics tools provide insights related to collaboration, engagement, user experience and productivity by harnessing data from multiple SaaS applications. Such tools provide value at multiple levels: personal, team/department, and organization-wide.
I&O leaders equipped with legacy tools to manage on-premises environments will be unable to take advantage of SaaS applications to lead digital disruption. Lead digital disruption with SaaS applications by deploying user enablement and management tools to create new business workflows in a perimeterless environment.
