I realize this may not be the first place you’ve heard this, but, here goes anyway: The cloud is big.
If you look at the history of computing in large organizations over the past 30 or so years, it’s hard to find a paradigm shift that’s been anywhere near as profound, or as fast. In just a few years, the cloud has become a de facto approach for many business and technology services. Here are just a few examples:
- Business applications. The SaaS model has completely redefined many key application segments—including sales force automation, human capital management, and marketing—to name just a few.
- Backup. Relying on cloud providers to store and protect backup files has been common practice for quite some time.
- Infrastructure. Using IaaS models for development and testing, scaling to accommodate fluctuating demand, and a host of other approaches are quite common today.
What about service management? To date, a big percentage of deployments have been on premise, but will that change? For many organizations, SaaS-based service management makes sense for several reasons:
- Common processes. ITIL has been broadly accepted for some time. Service management processes have been developed and refined over the course of years. The reality is that the service management processes in one organization will tend to bear a lot of similarities to processes in another organization. Consequently, it’s possible for an off-the-shelf SaaS platform to deliver the core capabilities the majority of organizations need.
- Uniqueness doesn’t add value. Customers won’t buy more of your company’s products because your service management processes are different than your competitor’s. They may buy more products if your processes make your support organization deliver better service than your competitors. This is a key distinction: a unique service desk in and of itself doesn’t add value. It’s what you do with the platform that matters.
- Cloud-friendly attributes. Many of the core characteristics of service management lend themselves to SaaS delivery. For example, these applications typically require low volumes of data traffic and they often offer self-service to users inside and outside of the firewall.
- Leverage collective expertise. Given the focus of vendors, and the fact their solutions get used by hundreds or thousands of companies, much more expertise, usage, and refinement can be brought to bear than a single customized implementation at any enterprise site. Plus, through the SaaS model, your business gets improvements automatically, without a user learning curve, and without the upgrade hassles.
When considering the alternatives for how service management is sourced, there are a whole lot of benefits pointing in favor of SaaS. Don’t be surprised if this becomes another application segment in which SaaS becomes the de facto standard.
Note: This is the fourth in a five-part series of posts on the simpler service desk. The prior post looked at the keys to achieving simplicity. In our final post, we’ll outline key things to avoid when making the move to SaaS.
