Selecting a software as a service (SaaS) is an effort which most organizations must periodically embark upon. The move to adopt a SaaS reflects a set of organizational goals that it is believed will be furthered by embracing the tradeoffs between control and cost that this type of move generally involves.

In order to successfully achieve those goals it’s essential that an organization make use of a framework that helps formalize the way that those goals relate to the characteristics of the vendors and their services. This kind of framework is a specialized version of a Business Architecture that is narrowed to focus on the goals, processes, knowledge elements, features and IT architecture that are in the target area of the SaaS evaluation effort.

Understanding how all these elements both are impacted and how they combine to provide an overall improvement in an organizations ability to achieve its goals is core to assuring that the correct SaaS is chosen. Failure to correctly evaluate the full impact can cause organizations to incur unforeseen costs as well as issues in timeliness and quality.

Enterprise Agility’s SaaS and Package Evaluation and Selection Process draws from multi-disciplinary expertise in addressing the challenges related to implementing business change and aligning technology to cost effectively support business agility. The process focuses four major steps that are tailored for an organization’s SaaS evaluation and selection efforts. These steps are:

• Determine Goals
• Identify Candidate Vendors
• Process Gap Analysis
• Evaluate Task Appropriateness

Within this service description, each step of the Enterprise Agility SaaS Evaluation and Selection Process is defined along with the major considerations addressed during the process.

Product Evaluation Excellence Service Description Click here to download this PDF