Is Saas the future of your corporate IT ?

This is one more question that haunts many people’s night. More serioulsy, if it doesn’t make people stay awakened all nights long, it creates debates and brings some confusion that doesn’t help businesses to move forward. As a matter of fact deploying any solution is not that easy when one still have many infrastructure related concerns.

So, let’s try to get cleared idead about what’s going on.

Which debate ?

To make it short,  while companies have been used to host their information system on their own infrastructure are facing the emergence of an alternative solution, called Software as a Service, that makes possible to deliver applications through the internet, using services that are not hosted by its IT dept anymore but by external providers. The debate could be simple (I manage everything by myself vs I let others dealing with the issues and I pay for for service) but there are security and privacy concerns that are not trivial. Concerns that are legitimate even if, sometimes, the answer is simple, in a world where old habits have a very heavy weight.

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Does enterprise 2.0 threaten your security ?

Among the many questions businesses have about enterprise 2.0,  this one has an important place. Not because enterprise 2.0 is necessarily dangerous but because any new thing brings a change in a situation that’s supposed to be secured. So the principle of precaution plays its part in organization where risk aversion is more important than anything else.

The purpose here is not to discuss the fact this risk aversion causes (or not) a form of phobia toward any kind of novelty that would be a barrier to any kind of evolution, of improvement. It’s about assessing if enterprise 2.0 brings a new security risk in organizations and, if so, how to deal with it.

What security ?

Security is a legitimate concern that, in fact, has to do with lots of different things to such an extent that when someone broaches this subject it(s hard to really know what he has in mind. With hindsight, businesses have to main concerns about security : the one is about structure security, the other is about information security.

By structural security I mean protection againt attacks toward the IT system itself. By information security I mean concerns about unauthorized information broadcasting or disclosure.

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The future of cloud computing is not necessarily outside the firewall

Discussing wheter companies have to keep their information systemes within their walls or host it, wholly or partly, outside is a central issue.

The Saas or “cloud computing” logic majes sens. The time has come to take away the sacred aura of what,  as Nicholas Carrs  wrote in The Big Switch, is becoming as banal as electricity or running water. Plug, use, unplung. Nothing more. It’s a service like any other and the software + hardware duo is not a sacred cow anymore in people’s life. So why should it be so at the office. Today it’s nothing more than a simple computer and nothing more than software, it’s a part of my everyday life and the only thing that matters is that it does what I expect it to do. I don’t care how it’s done or whether my favorite software is on the net net or on my hard drive. Employee’s computers have shifted from a strategic good to a common consumer good.

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Do enterprises really outsource the right things ?

Some of my reflections point to the slow but unavoidable outsourcing of the human side of the enterprise.

First because of organization models and systems that allow companies to focus on their core business : identifying key issues and needs, they can concentrate on elaboring a stragegy to respond…and let others do the rest. The rest, from innovation to delivery can be fully outsourced, to the general public or specialized partnes whose small size helps them being really agile and reactive. This organization model provides even more satisfaction to partners than if they were employed within the company. So, large businesses’ performance will highly rely on its ability to fin right answers and organize the competence chain to deliver.

We also have to know that incurate tools and organization causing high costs to access that so important ressource that internal information has become, Coase law could apply in reverse since outside expertise and knowledge is cheaper than internal one.

Then, and this previous post was only an example among many others, because knowledge process outsourcing becomes a real market and a source of growth for many countries that want to jump on this train et benefit from what will be their industrial revolution, putting an incredible presse on occidental companies that may see the advantages to outsource their knowledge processes.

There’s a simple reason to all that : since machines were there to imporve activities’ scalability, knowledge related activities still rely on people’s time. Even if some are slowers than others, it’s useless to replace them by more productive ones when the purpose is more qualitative than productive, the only solution is to hire more people, with the consequences we know about costs. Which must make us wonder more than ever on the question of work related costs in our occidental economies.

Sure, things will get balanced one day or the other, than one day the Indian worker will be as expensive as the european worker. But when ? Perhaps too late. And we can’t be sure there will never be a “new India”.

In brief, although it may looks very attractive, this trend is not a good thing for our economies.

Another point is that, since we all know in a knowledge economy people will be companies’ more important wealth, businesses are doing exactly the opposite of what they should : they keep control of their tools and outsource their people.

Whatever we could say, many IT depts step on the brakes as soon as they hear the word “Saas”, although the fact they will more and more need larger and more complex infrastructures to store more and more datas, will make it inevitable according to the experts.

It’s a strange paradox to see competences, skilles, expertises, slowly going out of companies that, at the same time, don’t want their information systems to go out of their firewal : common sense would make companies keep their people, their knowledge and outsource their IT. I can’t see the benefits of investing in technologies that allow businesses to take the most of their talents if the talents have left the company.

Do you know a good, free, online, project management app ?

This morning I received an email from a shattered friend.

She works for a company that organizes conferences and have something like 45 projects to manage at the same time, each of them being at a different stage of its life, and a lot of incoming and outgoing contacts (with both internal teams and outside people). She’s close to become really crazy if she don’t find a tool to help her.

Of course her employer won’t spend a euro for this.

Of course she needs an online solution since she won’t be allowed to install anything on her computer.

Do you have any idea ? Any suggestion ?