SaaS Management

  • 5 min read

Collaborate with these 5 Stakeholders for a Successful SaaS Management

Rohit Rao

5th March, 2023

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Collaboration of stakeholders is the key to well-structured SaaS management. It streamlines the process of managing SaaS apps in the organization and enhances the decisions. Also, it helps to mitigate security and compliance risks.

As there is growth in SaaS adoption, it becomes complicated for organizations to handle the SaaS applications and fails to manage them. So, it is crucial to encourage proactive participation and collaboration of stakeholders for an effective SaaS management strategy. Collaboration with stakeholders results in value creation for the organization and will help the business attain quality results on time. 

With efficient collaboration, the organization can deal with unexpected occurrences of SaaS apps by discovering potential risks. This way, the threats can be detected early and resolved quickly. 

To practice SaaS management effectively, you can use an appropriate platform in the organization that will help to collaborate with the key stakeholders. For example, the involved stakeholders need to understand the goals of SaaS management, which include visibility to the organization's SaaS landscape, reducing SaaS spending, increasing productivity, etc. The platform will help the stakeholders communicate the same within the organization.

This article will mention the key stakeholders who are required to engage in making the SaaS management strategy a successful one.

Key Stakeholders Involved in SaaS Management

Let us now look at the key stakeholders that should be engaged in the SaaS management strategy.

1. CIOs and CFOs

C-suite leaders are the decision-makers in any technology initiative. These chief IT leaders lead the strategic Saas management and help ensure secure and seamless business processes. In addition, CIOs are instrumental in deploying and selecting business-wide IT tools. 

The increase in Saas apps has given rise to some challenges for CIOs. These challenges include more visibility to SaaS apps, needing a view of usage data, etc. This leads to losing control over the SaaS apps. 

For strategic SaaS management, CIOs should get involved in managing and monitoring the complete lifecycle of the SaaS portfolio. The lifecycle of the organization's SaaS portfolio includes purchasing, deployment, licensing, renewals, and disposal.

Additionally, CIOs and CFOs' collaboration is crucial to the organization. The CIOs can give insights to CFOs on applications that will help make efficient SaaS management decisions on reducing expenses and maximizing the ROI. 

Likewise, CFOs can help CIOs get a complete view of business priorities, challenges and understanding of IT expenses. This will enable CIOs to choose appropriate SaaS apps to meet the organization's requirements and employees' needs.

With an appropriate SaaS management platform, CIOs can keep track of apps and gain visibility into the SaaS landscape. Furthermore, practising efficient SaaS management can align the apps to meet the business requirements to attain a return on technology investments.

2. IT Teams

IT teams enhance their role in the SaaS management strategy by collaborating with stakeholders and helping them streamline business processes. Managing SaaS apps and supporting users can be a complex task for IT teams, especially in choosing suitable apps for employees. 

IT teams may need more visibility across SaaS apps and have control over the apps. For example, you need more visibility to track the SaaS apps, which can give rise to security risks in the organization. Also, the IT team is involved in employees' onboarding and offboarding process. But manually performing regular IT tasks is time-consuming and prone to human errors.

With a proper SMP, IT teams can simplify their regular IT tasks. In addition, this will enhance the employee onboarding and offboarding experience by automating the process. 

Also, it will help the IT teams gain visibility into your organization's SaaS landscape. This will allow the IT teams to manage the SaaS apps and further mitigate security and compliance risks.

Moreover, IT teams can help businesses analyze and improve ROI on SaaS technology investments. An appropriate SaaS management strategy will help IT teams understand existing SaaS apps and the number of active users and licenses, track upcoming renewals, and accordingly make strategic decisions to improve SaaS management in the business. 

3. Procurement

Procurement and sourcing are essential for successful SaaS management. When the organization requires a new SaaS application, they need a procurement team to search for a SaaS vendor, select the suitable one, and make decisions for an efficient outcome. In addition, they ensure that the best practices for acquiring new tools will help the organization maximize the contract negotiations and purchase value.

Procurement teams investigate options, secure purchases, negotiate contracts, document app requirements, and help implement strategic SaaS management. By opting for the SaaS management platform, the procurement team can keep expenses under control and ensure you receive value for the purchase of apps. 

SMP simplifies the procurement team's implementation of SaaS management effectively and reduces the workload. In addition, it can allow transparency for better contract negotiations, help gather information for identifying cost-saving opportunities and enable license management.

4. Finance

In the SaaS world, the finance team generates reports on accounts payable, calculating expenses on SaaS apps, return on technology investments, and more. For implementing an effective SaaS management plan, the discovery of SaaS apps based on financial data is crucial to the business. In addition, this will give a comprehensive view of all the SaaS apps purchased within the organization. 

For this reason, the collaboration and support of the finance team is required. The support will help you identify the apps and reduce the SaaS spending by analyzing the data. In addition, detailed analysis will assist you in determining unused licenses, duplicate apps, abandoned apps, etc. 

To get insights automatically on SaaS apps based on spending, an efficient SaaS management strategy can be implemented. A SaaS management system can automate the whole management process of SaaS apps and help you discover the SaaS apps based on financial data. 

The system will reduce the effort and save the time of the finance teams. Moreover, you can reduce SaaS spending and maximize the value of SaaS buying.

5. Legal

The legal team is a crucial part of SaaS management practice. For the practice to succeed, it is necessary to consider all the aspects of managing SaaS apps. One of the aspects is to eliminate compliance risks. This elimination will further help you avoid hefty penalties during the audit.

SaaS apps used in the organization must adhere to compliance and regulatory frameworks per the business needs. This is possible when the legal team is involved in the SaaS management process. The legal team will ensure that the SaaS apps meet the required standards and help the organization stay compliant.

When the legal team understands the necessity of compliance, they can only communicate and educate the same to the organization's employees. 

In a decentralized organization, the best practice is to educate the employees regarding compliance risks and the importance of meeting compliance requirements. In addition, proper communication will help the employees independently sign up for apps that comply with government regulations. 

Further, contract negotiation is another essential part of SaaS management. The legal team assists in contract negotiations and helps you get a better deal for your organization. 

An appropriate SaaS management platform will help the legal teams centrally govern the SaaS apps and get a view of all the contract details with documents in a single place.

How Zluri Helps in Collaborating with the Stakeholders Efficiently?

Zluri, a SaaS management platform, helps key stakeholders get involved in SaaS management to manage the SaaS apps efficiently. It gives complete visibility into the SaaS landscape of the organization. This allows the CIOs to get an overview of the apps, like insights on redundant apps, usage monitoring data, department-wise spending, etc.

The insights will also help the CFOs to understand the return on technology investments and allocate the budget accordingly. These insights will help the finance teams analyze and find gaps between the allocated budget and the actual spending. 

Further, with Zluri, the IT teams can view the upcoming renewals and usage data and automate their regular IT tasks like onboarding, offboarding, and more. This will streamline the business processes and improve productivity in the organization. Zluri also gives information about security threats and prevents the organization from cyberattacks and data breaches.

Zluri offers a SaaS buying service that supports the procurement team in getting the appropriate vendors with the best deal for the organization. As a result, it helps you save time and money. Furthermore, it helps to negotiate on behalf of the company and work as an extended member, simplifying the procurement team's work.

In addition, the legal team can view all the contracts in a centrally managed platform along with necessary documents.

For further details, you can book a demo with Zluri.

About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.