Roadmaps and SaaS

Continuing from last week’s post about Old roadmaps being dangerous this week I’m going to explore some thoughts on how the increase in subscription based SaaS applications can affect EA roadmaps.

So how do Cloud based SaaS technology affect EA roadmaps?

The power of SaaS lies in the fact that the purchasing company doesn’t own a soon-to-be outdated technology. The cost of the applications is spread usually across a number of years and as the software vendor updates and upgrades the application, these features are made available to the purchaser. This means for outsourced services like purchasing or HR software the EA team needs to keep aware of the SaaS vendor’s roadmap and identify if it affects their own. Also, at the expiration of the contract the EA team should be evaluating that SaaS and making a recommendation on how it fits into the current and future company EA.

This breaks the old model of: Emerging à Production à Legacy à Exit.

A good SaaS company stays relevant through the adoption and deployment of new technology so the application never reaches the legacy stage without a major market shift. Yes there will always be new trends but companies will always need to manage the HR process and purchase items. The question is how can the SaaS enable and automate those processes so company employees can spend their time doing what the organization hired them to do. In addition, a company only needs to administer SaaS and not maintain the code freeing up IT and EA resources to focus on the company mission.

I see the new model as: Implement à Deploy à Adopt à optimize (and don’t stop)

Unless there is a strong reason to implement a new solution, companies who leverage outsources SaaS applications can stay in the optimize phase. To me, there is a strong value proposition in in the reduced costs of optimizing versus implementing a similar solution every few years. Your get new tools right away, the key is being agile enough to pick them up and use them.