But a closer look reveals that making the leap to the cloud brings
benefits to every level of the organization. For C-level management,
for the customer service and accounting team, for the IT team
and for the sales team, cloud computing offers direct and indirect
benefits that increase productivity, enhance flexibility and sustain
competitiveness.
Let’s take a look at a few key sections of the org chart to see how
the SaaS model delivers not only a mission-critical business application, but a whole new way of managing the business.
Operational Team
For the operational team, the biggest impacts of the SaaS model
are that it is device-agnostic, location-agnostic and network-agnostic. Team members are no longer restricted to using approved
machines in approved locations over approved networks. Instead,
cloud computing means that any desktop, laptop or tablet running
a standard browser over an Internet connection, is capable of
serving as a workstation, at any time. A team member’s system
settings and data, notes, reports, documents and work queue are
instantly available from anywhere.
As a result, companies can grow their virtual, dispersed workforce with only a fraction of the overhead and delays associated
with extending an in-house system. New users can be granted
authorized access to the system with minimal effort. And the
same is true when it comes time to withdraw a user’s access, as
well. And because SaaS is also platform-agnostic, it is perfectly
suited for large organizations with diverse systems in diverse locations as well as for small, distributed teams whose members may
work from home, coffee shops or local offices.
For C-level management, for the customer service and accounting
team, for the IT team and for the sales team, cloud computing
offers direct and indirect benefits that increase productivity,
enhance flexibility and sustain competitiveness.
In this light, the elasticity of resources inherent to the cloud
computing model plus the easy scalability of cloud-delivered solutions means that the organization itself gains scalability, and can
be more easily sized to match operational needs and strategic
opportunities.
IT Team
For the IT team managing implementations, a key difference
between installing and maintaining an in-house, owned-and-oper-ated system and using SaaS is that the latter requires no new IT
hardware purchases, no system installation expertise and no added
desktop support.
Starting from day one with a SaaS implementation, it is not the
in-house team’s problem to get the system up and running, assure
the full-time availability of the machines on which it runs, or handle
server-level issues that may crop up. Because a SaaS system is
accessed through any standard Web browser, getting each end-user onto the system requires no new software on staffers’ laptops
or desktop machines. And while the best of such systems allow
for user-level configurability of menu items, security permissions
and task management, such settings are handled by the system
provider during the setup phase.
The benefits of this division of labor continue well beyond
implementation. As one technology CEO stated, “In the past, IT
has spent 80% of its time and costs just managing the infrastruc-
ture. Eighty percent of that 80% has been focused on all end-user
services and fat PCs. Those days are over... In the cloud, infrastruc-
ture and even data can be delivered as a service.”
For more information, see the article Top Five Cloud Myths, Trends
and Recommendations by Tarkan Maner, CEO, Wyse Technology
Inc. at http://sandhill.com/article/top-five-cloud-myths-trends-and-
recommendations/.
For the IT team providing desktop support and version maintenance, an in-house, legacy system requires that each user’s
machine have its own copy of the software. So it is up to the IT
team to address any platform or application compatibility issues
that may arise. And, because no complex application is static, the
application vendor will be providing regular system upgrades, each
of which will need to be installed on every user’s machine, resulting
in losses in productivity as well as delays in customer service and
potential opportunity costs in the form of lost origination or sales
opportunities.
However, using SaaS, these IT overhead and risks either go
away or remain firmly placed on the plate of the system provider.
For example, when it’s time for a version upgrade, the provider
implements the new version and it instantly becomes available to
everyone on your team.
For the larger organization, this shift allows the IT team to focus
on other priorities. For smaller organizations, it may mean that,
for the first time, infrastructure-related tasks are being managed
with enterprise-level expertise. In addition, if a SaaS subscription
is replacing an existing in-house application, along with its infrastructure and support overhead, the net result for staffing is that IT
resources will be freed up for other assignments.
It’s also worth noting that the in-house model can result in a
particularly painful round of help requests when a user’s machine
goes awry. If the problem is serious enough, the system may need
to be reinstalled and reconfigured on a new machine, with all of
the usual hits to customer service and productivity that typically
accompany such an event. On the other hand, getting a staffer up
and running on a new machine using SaaS is as simple as firing up
the browser on any machine that happens to be handy. And adding
a new user to the team is as simple as getting a new logon and
password from the provider.
