Ride the SaaS Wave

Like the “ultimate wave” that can carry you on a seemingly endless run, most SaaS Cloud vendors continually introduce enhancements to reflect advancing industry best practices, regulatory changes and evolving business demands. Continual improvement opportunities and demands – from market, competitor and regulatory changes – come on a much faster cycle than in the old On-Premise world because of the release cycle that those Cloud Enterprise providers push. This puts pressure on your organisation to evolve your Enterprise Cloud solution more rapidly and via increased COLLABORATION between your stakeholder groups – to drive incremental strategic plan & solution development in a coherent, business-driven way.

Wax your Board

Extending the surfing analogy, both your IT *AND* business functions must be fully engaged in demand management and build planning to fully realise continual value increases in your Enterprise Cloud solution – to avoid getting stuck, bleeding on the coral! When a move to the Cloud is initiated by one or more of your business functions, they may assume that a move to Cloud will give them unilateral control over their solution. You should not underestimate the FRICTION that may arise between IT and business in such a situation; I have seen this happen in several cases.

Stay in the Barrel

Your System Implementer should provide you with a Target Operating Model (TOM) roadmap – a framework – that outlines key stakeholder roles & responsibilities, plus governance & processes, to support your Enterprise Cloud solution. However, many organisations suffer from a post go-live risk: namely, that the framework set up during implementation gets ‘forgotten’ after go-live, with key staff reverting to old roles. To avoid this pitfall, you should invest in an ENDURING MODEL with a clear strategy and governance, and leadership buy in (!), to ensure an ever-evolving TOM – one that your business groups must take a central role in driving to avoid an IT-dominated RUN model that fails to properly account for your organisation’s key business needs.