In enterprises that have stalled on their overall digital transformation strategy, there is often still innovation occurring within business units that delivers a better customer experience and new levels of agility. Many business managers find key elements of digital transformation with software as a service (SaaS), oftentimes bypassing the involvement of IT in procuring and launching a particular solution.
This progress found in digital transformation with SaaS underscores the importance of a unified approach between enterprise IT and business units as they pursue the goals and objectives of the organization through technology solutions. Here are three key areas that enterprises can focus on to get quick and measurable benefits through SaaS:
Integration with core applications: While on-premise solutions may require extensive coding to allow them to integrate with other tools, a SaaS solution generally comes with access to application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow integration between platforms to be as easy as turning on a switch. The involvement of IT with the business unit’s decisions regarding which solution they should deploy can help identify which options will most easily integrate with other key applications.
Improve communications: Enhanced communication is a key element in improving the customer experience, both for direct communication with the customer and for faster in-house decision-making that can impact the customer. Collaboration tools are increasingly being adopted as a SaaS solution driving digital transformation because employees can access features such as shared workspaces. In many cases, the tools are extended to customers, vendors, and other business partners.
The benefits of a SaaS solution for collaboration can easily be minimized if IT is not involved to ensure that customer and company data are protected within the solution as data is handled, stored, and travels back and forth to the cloud server. Driving digital transformation with SaaS needs to be balanced with a carefully constructed data security strategy.
Achieving better agility: One of the reasons that SaaS is a good fit for business units to pursue alongside a broader digital transformation strategy is that it offers the ability to quickly implement a solution that immediately delivers benefits to the customer. Customer satisfaction and cost-saving metrics may be impacted within months — if not weeks — and the low cost of SaaS introduces little risk into the business unit.
While business units may resist the involvement of IT in choosing SaaS solutions, the low barrier to entry in terms of cost or hardware installment usually means that even with taking time for IT to evaluate the security risk or other consequences the solution could have, it is a short time to implementation.
Is your enterprise stalled on broader digital initiatives? Driving digital transformation with SaaS can help you continue to improve the customer experience with a low-risk, low-cost investment in cloud solutions. Contact us at AMD Technology to learn more.