"Software @ your services" or SaaS?

When looking through my pile of brochures and commercial mails since the beginning of the year, I noticed that there is considerable amount of initiatives around topics like "IT governance", "CIO-CEO collaboration", "Business-IT connection" ... Reading the background and driver for the seminars, roundtables, publications ... I could only conclude that the real topic is about "the need for business applications and solutions (or IT in general if you wish) to be more or better at the service of the company's business".

The underlying reasoning has to do with the level of maturity of IT organisations. It is exactly the "lack of maturity" that is still quite often the painpoints of IT organizations and that feed the need for these "governace" initiatives.
I personally use a very simple kind of "maturity model", that basically scale IT organisations on a 0 to 3 scale of maturity.

• level 1 means that IT strungles with requirements like stability, availability, reliability. The basic level of service for the business is not for granted. This is a situation where the IT manager is a firefighter, trying to keep the systems and applications running (and not more than that)
• For a level 2 IT organization stability is not the problem. The infrastructure and applications are running, the system do to a large extend what is needed (at least what was requested at a certain point in time). The main characteristics here are re-activeness and the fact that IT consumes lots of resources, both in money and time, to adopt and evolve as is requested by the business (slow and expensive)
• The highest level of maturity is 3. An IT organisation at this level drives process changes and improvements for the business. The IT team is a key player to steer innovations or operational efficiencies for the business. Fast, easy and real impact ... are characteristics of such an IT organization.

To put it in other words, in a level 3 IT organization, the enterprise applications or the software is at the service of the business; fast and flexible. IT is an enabler and a partner of the business. In this ultimate level of maturity, the solutions are serving the business to be "best run".

In lots of publications these days, software as a service is put forward as the solution for IT organizations. Aside from the installed landscape, the existing platform and portfolio of applications, ... a SaaS solution is supposed to bring speed and flexibility. Without neglecting the positive elements from a SaaS solution, one can of course question how to deal with topics like long term sustainability, integration, integrity and yes "flexibility" is a longer term.

I can only conclude that IT organisations and IT suppliers, tend to come with technology solutions (and acronyms) as a solution for everything. Whether SaaS, or technology solutions like SOA, enterprise architecture ... will facilitate the communication between business and IT is questionable. One thing is for sure, there is a need to better "link" business and IT. So we should all be happy to see the mutitude of initiatives to bring IT and business closer together. Maybe topics like how enterprise software (business applications), can facilitate the collaboration and communication and help IT organizations to grow their level of maturity, rather than explaining the next big things ...