With software as a service activity rising, financial institutions must develop best practices to ensure successful implementation.
Developing software as a service (SaaS) solutions amid an organization’s digital transformation is complicated, but certain strategies can help organizations meet expectations, Jason Ferguson, senior vice president for group information systems and North American chief information officer at Computacenter, said during a SaaS webinar hosted by global financial technology firm Solifi on Sept. 18.
There are four ways to avoid pitfalls during SaaS implementation, Ferguson said:
- Avoid trying to implement too many changes at once.
- Establish a way to measure progress.
- Clarify plans and assign responsibilities to ensure each project is fully deployed and delivers value.
- Use techniques and tools common in M&A for effective implementation.
“Good portfolio management will focus attention and resources on a limited number of changes,” Ferguson said. “You can’t do it all, and you can’t do it all at once.”
Understanding the benefit of SaaS
One challenge to SaaS adoption is conveying the benefits of the technology to executives, Ferguson said. With more emerging technologies in finance, 61% of U.S. leaders believe technology divisions must do more to help executives understand the potential business impact.
It is critical to “create a way to visualize your business, how it operates [and] how change, such as new technology, will create impact,” he said. “Sometimes that’s simply a matter of having the right language … and the right vocabulary to talk about the business and to visualize it and understand it.”
To make SaaS technology easier to understand and implement, technology teams can create a visualization for executives, Ferguson said.
Documenting business architecture helps facilitate discussions about change and enables subordinates to pitch new solutions,” he said. “These are things that you can do in a digital transformation with SaaS.”
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