With the potential in a dynamic SaaS driven environment, you have a great opportunity in tuning your toolbox to match the challenges put upon you. But is dynamic always good – and how do you keep track of things when all is ever changing?
Size matters
If you want to benefit from a structured SaaS Subscription Management and Optimisation approach, you have to think about your company’s size first. Companies with less than 60 employees face completely different problems, than companies having more than 100-150 employees, so bear in mind that different size brings various approaches, the key thing is to choose and adopt the right one.
When being a small organisation, the ownership of SaaS subscription management and optimisation is rarely addressed. The need is often not acknowledged or prioritised. It does not mean that there isn’t a potential, just that the focus is pointed elsewhere and the complexity in the organisation is rather limited due the size.
Most organisations find that when reaching +60-70 employees, it becomes more important to frequently validate your SaaS Spend – and that this task should be owned by someone, most likely, within finance. Reaching this size often introduces more complexity and increased structure, but also the on-boarding of back office employees, focused on more detailed matters within the finance landscape. This introduces the opportunity to actively manage and optimise your company’s SaaS operation.
Flexible approach vs. centrally controlled access
The bigger company – the more challenges with shadow IT. Every new project or team comes with new requirements. Employees find that immediate availability to SaaS vendors helps them to improve productivity and drive innovation. In this process, there is a difficult balance between accepting and supporting full flexible access or centrally controlled access. The aim is not to set everything free with constant growing number of SaaS Vendors in use (or barely in use), but much rather to allow for employees to engage and then map out usage and spend to see if the selected vendors actually are in use – and bringing the value.
Time for an inventory check?
How many cars have you bought last year? Well, you usually know this information, unless you’re not a millionaire, and if not, you simply look in your garage. The same situation occurs with apps and software in your company. With an open approach you will soon enough end up with a large number of SaaS vendors in your garage – but when its pretty simple to keep inventory on your stocks of cars, keeping track of SaaS vendors is far more tricky.
Using a SaaS subscription management software like Viio will provide you the needed inventory check. You can monitor how your organisation is adopting new tools and how other tools are left behind. From a financial perspective you will be able to connect the dots and not only have financial perspective, combining usage and spend. And you will be able to assign ownership earlier as getting in control have become much simpler.
The right involvement and ownership is key
If you want to be successful in optimising your SaaS setup and act in due time to changes around you, the key role to support is less the IT manager, but more your financial department. These guys are your company’s money-keepers and it is critical for them to have full insights to ongoing spend and cashflow.
As such, it is important to ensure full transparency across all engagement you may have with SaaS vendors – and make sure that your finance department is included in as key stakeholders.
Prepare your business for even faster delivery in the next five years
In relation to SaaS, there appear one key word for overall development and transition, no matter of the size of your business – speed. In the next five years, Gartner expects, that organisations will intensify their investments in capabilities to improve the speed to change: investment in software with prebuilt industry components, high-productivity application platform as a service (aPaaS), intelligent business process management (iBPM), augmented analytics, DevOps tools and agile deployment approaches.
So if speed is essential, navigation at high speed becomes equally important. Being in control also means that you can adjust budgets according to the present and future need and thus be one step ahead your competitors.
Our take is that you need to remember bringing in all stakeholders – and that your financial team for sure should be invited on the ride.
