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SaaS and Cloud Computing: CIO's Increasingly Marginalized
We reported recently that increasingly CFO’s are calling the shots for how IT budgets will be spent. Parallel to that trend is the fact that more CIO’s are reporting directly to the CFO. Now Liz Herbert, principal analyst at Forrester Research, is reporting that SaaS and Cloud Computing is making it increasingly easy for non-IT departments to simply by-pass their own IT staff.
The self-service model and low-entry-fee subscription costs now makes it easy for many departments to directly engage SaaS application services, without any assistance from their internal IT. The report found that that is exactly what is happening. Business groups are now the “primary driver” behind the engagement of SaaS applications. The report found that 49 percent of SaaS engagements are purchased by line-of-business VP’s and managers.
While, in many cases, organizations are seeing lower costs and both quicker and easier provisioning of applications, the report notes that this is ultimately a disturbing trend. The job of the central IT staff should be to create a ‘big-picture’ view of how technology is used in the organization, to oversee IT costs and to help mitigate any risks. But when each department or group takes the initiative to manage applications, there begin to be issues related to security, duplication, economies of scale, and integration. The CIO and the IT department are effectively being marginalized by these end-runs around the IT organization.
The Forrester report also includes some of the standard types of statistics on cloud adoption standards:
- 53 percent say they like the cost savings of SaaS
- 48 percent anticipate long-term cost savings by using SaaS
- 46 percent say the SaaS lets them roll out new application features quicker
- 45 percent say that they are able to be up and running quicker with SaaS
- 34 percent say that SaaS lets them better support their remote and mobile workers
- 18 percent say that the use of SaaS applications result in better customer satisfaction
