New Technology Driving a New Philosophy for Service Management Systems

Research shows that Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, which accounted for little more than 6% of the total Enterprise Software market in 2008, will represent more than double that percentage by the end of 2011 - and the growth is likely to remain exponentially impressive. As a result, over the last 4 years these applications have been seen to have a significant impact on the whole service management solution marketplace.
A shift towards hosted solutions has been driven by a number of factors, in particular the flexibility afforded to the user by these types of solutions - given the imperative imposed on businesses to adapt or suffer the consequences in these cost-conscious times. The value of these solutions is most obvious for companies trying to increase the speed of adaptation and transformation of their service operation from simple break/fix into brand-and-people-driven operations, providing customers with high-value knowledge input. The role of the service management solution consequently becomes more than just an efficiency engine supporting productivity, and instead provides real-time, instantaneous data transfer, providing usable information immediately and creating a highly effective operation.
A challenge for many companies is to have their service management system on a single platform; currently systems are rarely fully integrated despite the claims of providers, instead being comprised of a number of systems coming from different sources, and most solution providers currently do not provide a complete solution. This is despite the fact that a single platform provides the basis for total visibility and gives a significant advantage.
For a successful service transformation, as the operation develops, businesses have to deal with significant change, including a complete overhaul of their measurement and process dashboards. Once the measures and processes start to be questioned, the obvious uncertainty is how fast and how radical the changes should be. It would appear that one reason for the phenomenal growth in SaaS is its ability to provide a rapid speed of change, allowing adaption to become significantly faster and cheaper to execute.
Some software providers are now extremely agile and able to assume a new role in the implementation process, supporting the customer with continuous improvement as well as ensuring that the software develops effectively in line with the changing needs of the customer, and no gap is permitted between the latest product and what the customer is using. This shift of role and responsibility has encouraged some suppliers to focus heavily on providing the highest quality of service to their customers during and after implementation, guaranteeing fast results and, most importantly, continuous improvement and support throughout the lifetime of the solution.
If the effective lifetime of the system can be extended, then the benefits are obvious. Many solutions comprise a modular structure - which can be fine as long as they can be fully integrated, but the opportunity for adaption is often more illusory than real. The key to future-proofing is to configure systems to maintain alignment with changing requirements, giving the advantage that the system evolves as the business transforms, therefore training and staff development can continually be worked on - with the benefit of continuous improvement and positive demonstrable outcomes. Future-proofing also means that the disadvantages of upgrades or changes taking time and incurring cost can be avoided as the software remains fully up-to-date, thereby increasing its value to the customer and ultimately the customer's customer. A supplier able to continually align each solution to the customer's own requirements gains control over common problems such as diverse customers operating with different versions, or the customer unable or refusing to upgrade - so the solution accrues greater value.
The philosophy change is there to see, as customers become more demanding of their technology providers and are no longer prepared to "dumb-down" when they come into the work place. Customers are also expecting service management system providers to support them with sustainable solutions which can be utilised over a number of years, without high-cost upgrades or replacements every couple of years - in other words a relatively low life-time cost, commensurate with other technology providers.