Software as a service (SaaS) governance is a big deal at enterprise organizations. Companies use a plethora of software platforms — for managing customer relationships to collaborative work to human resources. As organizations scale remote and hybrid work models based on employee preference, they need more control over the software their employees use.
IT departments typically shoulder the load for figuring this out. And, according to Gartner, this is a suboptimal approach to managing SaaS sprawl and building out governance best practices. In a recent report, Gartner found that many “digital workplace initiatives are failing to achieve their full potential because of ineffective communication and collaboration with key IT, business, and vendor stakeholders.”
Gartner also found that organizations can experience unnecessary financial losses or fail to meet business goals without a clearly defined, strategic approach for controlled SaaS use. Since best practices for SaaS governance and control are evolving, there’s no consensus on the best ways to approach standards, policies, staffing, or tooling.
However, one thing is for certain: IT needs to step up once again to help solve these challenges and lead their organizations into the future. While there are always variables based on your company size and industry, there are three things IT leaders need to consider when building out a SaaS governance model.
1. Work strategically with business leaders
We know you’ve heard this before. But digital transformation requires even more cross-functional collaboration from everyone — not just IT. IT leaders must work with business teams to ensure responsible data and technology usage while driving business outcomes.
IDG found in their 2021 State of the CIO report that IT leaders are being tasked to create and sustain initiatives that generate revenue. SaaS tool consolidation, and automating workflows and processes, are some of the ways businesses can get there. But that’s just part of the story.
In order to improve business innovation, IT and business leaders must work together to create a strong governance model. Backlogs tend to take the wind out of the business’ sails, and IT can be the champion who unblocks business users so they can innovate.
Once both parties agree on the proper governance model, employees can build their own no-code solutions to manage projects and resources, automate repetitive tasks and business processes, build easy-to-navigate apps that support cross-functional collaboration, and more. This way, everyone can thrive — whether they’re in the office, working from home, or somewhere in-between.
2. Empower teams to work autonomously
Gartner predicts that by 2023, the number of active citizen developers will be at least four times greater than the number of professional developers at large enterprises. And according to the Spiceworks 2021 State of IT report, 35% of organizations planned to rapidly move workloads to cloud-based services. Frankly put, IT is outnumbered — but not overmatched.
In terms of planning, execution, and security, there’s a tangible opportunity for IT to help invest in the best tools for their end users while consolidating their tech stack and maintaining governance standards. Doing so can be a win-win: IT can give teams autonomy for building with SaaS platforms that are easier to maintain, from an administrative perspective.
IT teams can help create citizen developer rules and regulations, and work with business leaders to select the best software applications for their company’s needs. Leaders must collaborate to embrace a community of practice (CoP), where the goal is to educate and empower their employees to build their own no-code solutions.
This way, IT workers can partner with business leaders to establish guardrails and best practices, but not be solely responsible for maintaining the program. After all, enterprise IT teams are already swamped managing infrastructure, support, business intelligence, enterprise systems and solutions, and a whole lot more. These business initiatives can succeed or fail based on how well teams communicate and collaborate.
A collaborative work management (CWM) platform, especially Smartsheet, enables IT to manage risk and maintain compliance — while empowering their business teams to rapidly build and scale business-driven solutions. And an enterprise-grade CWM platform is able to integrate multiple core software applications and systems of record.
3. Integrate your core technology stack
When it comes to cross-functional collaboration and establishing a SaaS governance model, integrating software tools is critical for organizational alignment. Integrations help teams gain and sustain work momentum, and if connected the right way, give leaders and managers better visibility into work at all levels.
If an engineering or programming leader has access to Jira sprints in their work management platform, they gain a clearer view into progress, and can work to unblock individuals and teams who are stuck or struggling.
The IDG 2021 Pandemic Business Impact Study found that 49% of IT leaders believe digital transformation will continue to accelerate. Digital transformation is a key step in staying competitive, and can make organizations more efficient and innovative at scale. Unsurprisingly, IT and business buyers should select software platforms and applications that can safely transfer data between systems.
In such instances, enterprise-grade means partnering with trusted vendors who also place a high priority on vendor-to-vendor integrations that facilitate work throughout the IT ecosystem and undergo the enterprise’s security audits to meet the highest industry standards and regulatory requirements. In the era of digital transformation, stand-alone applications that don’t simultaneously enable data flow and security are a risk to businesses.
How Smartsheet integrates with your technology stack
In addition to having best-in-class security and governance controls, Smartsheet integrates with your critical data sources while enabling you to consolidate many point and capability solutions to a more secure platform. And we are continuing to expand our ecosystem to provide more ways to connect Smartsheet across your entire tech stack.
Smartsheet seamlessly connects with the systems of record and productivity apps your teams use everyday, helping improve visibility, collaboration, and decision-making across teams. We have integrations today with industry-leading platforms including Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, and ServiceNow. As well as integrations with popular productivity tools like Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and more.
We also have WorkApps, which allows citizen developers to build apps, make business impact, and provide visibility on progress to managers and leaders. WorkApps allow anyone to package Smartsheet items — such as sheets, dashboards, and reports — and external online content such as Microsoft 365 or Google documents, Tableau and Lucidchart dashboards, Domo visualizations, Adobe XD Creative Cloud assets, Prezi presentations, and more, into a single app experience.
Smartsheet also integrates its processes with McAfee’s MVISION cloud security platform. This allows customers to add controls created by McAfee to secure data and identify and flag use of sensitive and critical datasets. The service also includes threat and anomaly detection combined with data loss prevention policies. The McAfee security addition is one more step Smartsheet is taking to ensure that user data is secure.
With a wellspring of support from workers all over the world, remote and hybrid work models aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. IT and business leaders must collaborate to create SaaS governance best practices to ensure that people are empowered, productive, efficient, and successful. By working together, they can clear a path forward that benefits employees and the business.
The Smartsheet platform is built for the enterprise with the flexibility teams need and the security IT expects. Smartsheet Advance builds on the power of the platform to arm both the business and IT with powerful capabilities to scale innovation across the enterprise.