Extending the Service in SaaS
Last month, I attended a great teleseminar on technology for fundraising hosted by non-profit consultant, NYU professor and my friend, Ruthellen Rubin. The big question? What role should technology play in a non-profit’s developmental efforts, and how can it be sustainable and valuable to the organization?
At a very high level, one of the main answers was that no matter what technology a non-profit chooses to purchase (Web development, donor management, etc.), there needs to be a plan, people need to be trained, and the technology needs to be ingrained in the processes of the organization.
On the surface, this may seem obvious. Perhaps being in the tech world, we think we understand what constitutes a successful technology implementation. But, what struck me during this presentation was that this is not just a non-profit problem, it most likely spans pretty much every industry that is purchasing any kind of technology.
For technology vendors, this problem is an opportunity. As most technology moves in the direction of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), big contracts and technology spends are a thing of the past — maintaining a happy customer is what’s most important. Leaving the training and integration of a technology up to the company that you just sold it to is probably not the wisest decision anymore. A few months down the road, if they are not seeing value or usage, that SaaS switch will most likely get turned off. Companies like IBM and Accenture have long implemented on-premise technologies, trained users and integrated them into business processes. They are hired to make sure the technology a company just spent millions on will be sustainable, valuable and actually used within the company. Now is the time for that model to be pared down a bit and applied by SaaS technology companies.
There is a huge opportunity for these companies to become consultancies and value-added resellers of their own to keep their customers happy — like a more specialized version of an Accenture or IBM. Yes, software itself is a service, but perhaps it’s time that service now needs to be extended well beyond just the technology.
UPDATE: Appirio appears to be a cool company that implements SaaS solutions much like a traditional IT consultancy would — initial strategy, implementation and eduction.