Office 2.0 is just around the corner, and I am preparing for my session (going 100% SaaS) by interacting with my panelists, and doing some thinking. My current thread is thinking about IT and its traditional role vs. its new role in the SaaS era. There were ups and downs in the way IT viewed SaaS and now it seems that IT professionals divide into two camps: the ones that strongly embrace SaaS, and the ones that wait for it to go away.
In general, the ones that want it to go away like control, like hands on approach, and rather do the tactical work as a way to keep their kingdom intact. If you work for a startup, you may not believe me, but in a big company your worth goes up with the number of people you manage, and you don't want to lose anyone you gained.
The ones who love SaaS understand that it is here to stay and while not perfect, it allows significant time saving since somebody else is doing the mundane work for you. There are people that get paid to perform upgrades for you, take care of security, make sure the servers are up and that response time is great. The SaaS providers are more efficient since one operations team is responsible for many thousands of users.
People need to realize that the only role of technology advancements is to save time and have intelligent people decide what to do with this extra time. All productivity enhancements happened exactly this way. With all the extra time that can be saved, IT can become more strategic to the organization (and have much more interesting jobs...), and focus on improving tools and services, talk with their internal clients, and find ways to make their lives better, and stop worrying about up time and power outages.
Not every organization can go 100% SaaS yet, and even for the ones that can there are many challenges in integration, many different parts that need to be glued together, and multiple ISVs to work with. But if SaaS is right for your organization, find a way for IT to participate and use wisely all the extra time they will have.
Doug Harr, CIO at Ingres, will represent this point of view in the going 100% SaaS session.
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