Five Goals for SaaS Management

These five goals for SaaS management ensure the proper controls are set around your SaaS investments. From elementary to advanced, once met, these goals will drive your SaaS strategy into the future.

Uncover opportunities for cost savings, better employee experience, and grow revenue through professional SaaS management.

Goal 1: Establish a SaaS System of Record

Our first SaaS Management goal is about getting the big picture. Shadow IT carries inefficiencies, security risks, and hidden costs. With a SaaS system of record, mitigate risk, and contain costs through the discovery of SaaS applications.

Enterprises manage an average of 650 SaaS applications. Discovering these applications has proven nearly impossible. In fact, Zylo discovers three times as much SaaS spend and nearly two times as many applications as the average enterprises estimate through manual efforts.

Once the discovery of applications is complete, a SaaS system of record also contains all the relevant information necessary to determine the value of the enterprise SaaS stack.

A SaaS system of record includes:

• All applications: Today, more than 70% of SaaS spend is found outside of IT.
• SaaS buyers: Anyone who buys SaaS in the company must be trained to be good tech stewards.
• Cost centers for each application: When applications are purchased throughout the enterprise, at times the spend is shared, or duplicated, over departments.
• SaaS renewals: A tight renewal process and calendar ensures the success of every renewal.

Goal 2: Collaborate with Business Units

In the age of SaaS, business units are frequently responsible for 72% or more of the overall tech budget. Therefore, to drive SaaS innovation and optimization strategies, business units must be included in reporting and decision-making processes. After all, SaaS management is a team sport.

Regular stakeholder meetings with business leaders open lines of communication and build relationships to drive value and best practices. Collaboration can be attained through stakeholder meetings as well as software solutions.

Zylo drives collaboration by assigning owners to all applications, providing views into departmental spend, and enabling sentiment surveys. In the modern enterprise, a healthy collaboration between IT and business leaders enables the sharing of time, expertise, accountability, and success.

IT and business unit collaboration includes:

• Department-specific reports: Show each department what applications are regularly bought and utilized.
• Understanding of department goals: Understand how apps are used and what business goal is being met.
• Understanding of challenges: Analyze app utilization to ensure proper implementation and training of tools.
• Alignment to enterprise strategies: The overarching goals of IT should be communicated with business units to ensure the continued adoption of approved technology.

Goal 3: Contain SaaS Costs

No matter the industry, expect SaaS costs to grow within your company (growing SaaS costs means a growing company). Proper controls will help ensure that growth is as efficient as possible.

With a SaaS system of record and healthy IT collaboration, cost containment opportunities become actionable. Without Zylo, continual scrubbing of financial data is necessary to discover cost containment opportunities, such as eliminating multi-source spend. And the adoption of SaaS Management will help achieve the goal of containing costs.

With Zylo, IT leaders can identify multi-source spend, redundant applications, and underutilized applications. From these insights, IT can take action to contain costs and drive value throughout the technology stack.

Zylo’s enterprise customer success team provides continual guidance to uncover opportunities for cost savings and SaaS optimizations

Cost containment activities include:

• Reduce multi-source spending: Receive alerts when applications are expensed or sent through accounts payable.
• Consolidate redundant applications: Identify and consolidate applications with overlapping functions or cost centers.
• Drive enterprise-level negotiations: View application purchase and use across departments to drive for a more efficient enterprise-wide agreement.
• Optimize License Management: Use application utilization data to reharvest and redistribute inactive licenses.

Goal 4: Cultivate Governance

While SaaS applications serve a variety of functions, expectations of security, integration, and value must be met across all SaaS investments. Best practices for SaaS governance enables IT to empower business units to research, purchase, implement, and manage SaaS applications.

With Zylo-powered insights, IT can drive best practices at the source: the buyer. Without Zylo, stakeholder meetings are necessary to continue uncovering and assigning ownership to applications.

As best practices are driven at a user level, prioritize driving best practices through SaaS buyers and users in high-spend and high-risk departments. Healthy relationships built through collaboration are necessary to drive these best practices.

Best SaaS management practices to cultivate include:

• Continual discovery: Eliminate shadow IT with ongoing discovery of applications.
• Renewal management: Create a calendar to plan for due diligence, such as license optimization, user sentiment, and POCs of competing products.
• Adoption process: Ensure each SaaS buyer requires the vendor to sign an SLA, involve procurement when necessary.
• Implementation process: Include tech in the corporate learning strategies to ensure adequate utilization of SaaS investments.
• Risk mitigation: Fully leverage your SSO. Track and restrict access to applications housing sensitive data and drive vendors through the SLA.

Goal 5: Calculate Value

IT can ensure the return on investment (ROI) for SaaS is reached by determining and measuring against KPIs that feature both quantitative and qualitative components. For example, employee experience should be measured against net promoter scores as well as user surveys.

As technology becomes embedded in the business, ROI has often been measured via both IT goals and business goals. The modern IT leaders will be measuring tech investments against employee experience, customer experience, and more.

However, in many organizations, IT is still measured against hard cost savings, tool adoption success, and budgeting accuracy. Therefore, ROI measurements will include both traditional IT goals and business goals. In Zylo, utilization, sentiment, and spend metrics enable IT leaders to narrow in on ROI calculations.

ROI calculations to master include:

• Hard cost savings: Relating back to Goal #3, cost savings opportunities vary from license optimization to the reduction of multi-source spend.
• Accuracy of budgeting efforts: Compare actual year spend to the forecast-ed value to drive new processes to improve accuracy.
• Effective adoption of tools: Reinvest savings into corporate learning tools and programs to ensure adequate use of tech investments.
• Employee experience: Poll users to determine if applications are meeting their needs.
• Customer experience: Dive deep into the customer experience to ensure that tools are augmenting, not detracting, from the customer experience.

If you and your team are ready to start tackling these SaaS management goals, request a demo of Zylo’s SaaS management platform today to begin understanding and optimizing your organization’s fully SaaS inventory.