Focus on how SaaS can change your business

The Situation: To remain competitive, enterprises must move their business processes to the cloud. According to HFS data, 95% of enterprises agree that SaaS (software as a service) makes it easier to adopt software at scale across their organization, and 95% agree the adoption of SaaS allows them to differentiate their services¹. However, enterprises must adopt a holistic approach to SaaS adoption to achieve these and other business benefits.

To maximize your investments in SaaS, you must look beyond your process silos, not only enterprise-wide but ecosystem-wide. This alignment with the HFS OneEcosystem™ will deliver the best business results long-term.

Identify your desired business outcome

Identifying business outcomes relevant to the organization, its employees, and customers is crucial to having a resilient software strategy. Too often, technology and business don’t align on what they are trying to achieve by switching to a SaaS solution. They must jointly understand and agree upon what constitutes long-term business value creation. We had two conversations with human resource directors selecting Workday. One completely missed the point, while the other was brave enough to make a bold decision.

This HR director missed the point

The HR director listed all the current tasks and processes their current HR solution delivered. The enterprise selection team then painstakingly went through the Workday offering to find exact alignment with their list to decide whether Workday was a viable alternative software to run their HR process. Here the obvious question to ask is, “Why are you bothering?” This approach constituted a direct technical re-platforming to the cloud. It may have created some surface-level satisfaction, such as having access to new data, a scalable and accessible solution, and improved security; however, with no consideration for any process transformation, this enterprise would have made few gains other than some specific short-term task efficiencies.

This HR director made a bold decision

The HR Director compared Workday with a competitive SaaS solution. He admitted that Workday did not have the same depth of functionality as the competitive option. However, that didn’t matter. The enterprise still selected Workday because of Workday’s vision and roadmap. The HR Director believed that Workday prioritized investments in innovation and vision for the HR space. The enterprise wanted to stay abreast of the latest thinking and deliver a true transformation, including suggestions of how to run the HR process differently. He focused on creating business value, essential for long-term, meaningful impacts on how the enterprise works, including improving user experience, customer experience, and reducing costs.

The approach is as important as the solution

Workday is just the example here, and we are not advocating that it is the best fit HR solution for every enterprise. However, these different approaches illustrate the difference between the laggards and leaders in the market. As a business or technology leader, you owe it to your stakeholders to have an eye on the future. Achieve this by understanding that the best technology helps transform your business rather than myopically improving customer satisfaction solely with functionality improvements.

Get advice from the people who matter

To achieve a leader mindset, SaaS software selection teams should include a mix of in-house and external representatives from technical and business backgrounds:

Exhibit 1: Example stakeholders to consult on SaaS selection

Source: HFS Research, 2022

Exhibit 1 illustrates examples of essential stakeholders you must bring to the selection table. Considering opinions from different angles is imperative for setting and agreeing on the long-term goals of how the software will impact the business, employee, and customer experiences.

Consider your ecosystem, not just your enterprise

We have spoken with several customers who said they selected software because their customers, partners, or suppliers were also using it. Implementing software that has technical interoperability and makes business sense enterprise-wide is powerful; it helps your teams manage workload more effectively, ensures data is an asset that can be shared, and aligns multiple parties around a clear WIFM (What’s in it for me?) outcome.

Considering software in the context of your entire ecosystem elevates your firm to the next level of competitiveness. This alignment to the HFS OneEcosystem™ mindset highlights the seamless collaboration and connection points across their ecosystem of partners if they want to remain relevant to present and future customers.

The Bottom Line: It’s not so important what the SaaS software can do for you. It’s more about how it can transform how you do business to deliver demonstrable business benefits and achieve competitive advantage.

Consider SaaS in a wider context than its technical functionality. Always focus on the desired business results. Understand the process you want to transform, including why you want to transform it and what good would look like in the future. Consult with internal and external experts to achieve a leader’s mindset, and always bring your employees along with you on the journey.

¹Sample: 600 executives across Global 2000 enterprises, HFS Pulse Survey, H2, 2021. Percentage of respondents who definitely or somewhat agree.