Office of the Flywheel

With Software as a Service (SaaS) coming to maturity in the last several years, and the market valuation of companies embracing SaaS/Cloud/Web technologies, there is an exodus in all sorts of industries with businesses migrating from legacy infrastructure. And for good reason, SaaS offers all sorts of benefits.

But I've noticed a gap that if left unchecked can become a significant area of risk.

Empirical Understanding
On one hand you have people with empirical understanding. These people know what the business does in a hands on way - empirically. They know the process step-by-step, into the details, and "WHY" the business does "WHAT."
Pain:

• Slow and lacks automation
• Runs on old technology or hand done / paper processes
• Uses a "throw people at it" approach
• High cost

Benefits:

• An empirically based understanding
• A depth of understanding into the details
• The foundation that allows the business to get the service "right"
• Products, services, and support that are based on this knowledge

Technical Capability
On the other hand, businesses either develop in-house talent or retain outsource vendors who have strong technical capability. These teams build better ways to do what the business does, replacing slow or manual processes with automation, and extending areas of control to clients.
Pain:

• Requires significant upfront investment
• Requires time to build
• Requires the right people to develop
• Requires the business embrace a new way of doing business

Benefits:

• Current technology with lower cost of ownership
• Transitions human cost to clients
• Gives clients the control they want
• Can create a cross business platform

Risk In The Middle
The gap between these groups is almost a "generational" gap, where the empirical "legacy" generation is eventually eclipsed by the new technical "SaaS" generation. But so what? What is the big deal?

Think first about the complexity of your businesses. Your operations people fulfill your products or services, they don't build or understand technology.

Technology is capable of providing tools that solve complex problems. Technologists build tools, they don't fulfill your products or services.

If you do not form a plan to bridge these two groups, you will effectively build a "generation gap" into your business.





Solving this at first brush may seem easy, but consider the following:

Empirical Knowledge:

• Does your leadership have a deep empirical understanding of your products or services?
• Do you have mechanisms in place that help facilitate this understanding with leadership?
• Do you utilize these mechanisms to help communicate this understanding to your technologists?
• If the answer to any of these is "no", are you planning to implement learning mechanisms?

Technical Knowledge:

• Does your leadership have a deep understanding of how your technology is built?
• Do you have mechanisms in place that help facilitate this understanding with leadership?
• Do you utilize these mechanisms to help communicate this understanding to your operations people?
• If the answer to any of these is "no", are you planning to implement learning mechanisms?

The Role of Product Management
Senior leadership is always incredibly busy. So the first thing I would say is that if your business is considering or beginning a migration from a legacy platform to SaaS, an investment of time from leadership is critical. That said, the goal should be to maximize the time spent by leadership. But the same is true of your operations and technology development groups.

Product management should take a leadership role in facilitating the information share and learning. Moreover, the design of this approach should work for leadership, ops, and development.

This isn't to say that product management should become a training team. You may also need create such a team, but product management should be blazing the trail.

Why product management? If you are going to evolve into a SaaS based company, you need to evolve your product management competency to support this. You will need product managers who come from both sides. Technical PMs need to take the time to thoroughly understand the business, and business PMs the technology. How else can you possibly manage SaaS based products?

What you end up with is a small group that sees both sides of the fence. This should be reflected in the product requirement documents, application architectures, functional specifications, executive summaries, business cases, and the myriad of documents that come out of product management.

From there I'm a big fan of web-based video. This may be where you incorporate a training team who can take direction from product management on the "who & what" to film. Video is a great format, is inexpensive, and becomes a powerful tool. You can easily do interviews, screen capture, and film the white boarding of concepts, to name a few things. It is a "do it once, reuse it many times across multiple locations" format. And when you shoot internal-only video, production value takes a back seat to the value of training, and the speed of the impact. Moreover, it is a SaaS based tool, and if you are transitioning to a SaaS platform it is a great way to embrace the concept to build internal competency about the concepts.

Take Away
Obviously there are a lot of ways to skin the cat. But if you are transitioning your business to SaaS, don't just hope that somehow your business will learn the new technology, or that the respective groups will educate each other. To be successful you MUST design a disciplined plan that:

• has product management blaze the trail
• uses tools and/or groups that can educate
• creates content that trains SaaS to operations, and in-house competency to development
• and both sides to leadership

The result should be a solid cross-competency within your organization. Strategically you will be able to execute better - the payoff to leadership for investing their time. Tactically operations will be able to fulfill products & services better; and technical development will be able to bring SaaS to bear in more effective ways.

Now Zoom Out
Reconsider that many businesses in many industries are going through a similar migration. And the marketplace is demanding the same Web/Cloud/App based user experience with their business applications that they have with their personal applications. And if it hasn't happened yet, it is likely that your competitors will soon be considering SaaS/Cloud/Web/Apps to support their clients.

Now consider your approach to a SaaS migration. Businesses who win don't just do whatever it is, they do it better. So don't just rush at SaaS. Slow down, migrate better, set the stage for better ongoing execution, and win.