Unless you’ve been squirreled away in your home office, you’ve heard about the rise in digital transformation across companies of all sizes. According to a McKinsey & Company 2022 survey, 90 percent of organizations underwent at least one major digital transformation between 2020 and 2022. In other words, a large number of your competitors might be trying to outmaneuver you through a tech-related revamp. If this makes you rethink your decision not to have any IT personnel, you’re a wise leader. After all, having at least one full-time IT team member within the fold could open the doors for you to make sure your tech stack is advanced, maintained, and secure. The only problem is that you can’t just jump ahead without weighing the pros and cons of bringing IT professionals aboard. The pros aren’t hard to imagine. An IT-focused staff member can serve as the point of contact for all your technical questions and solutions. You’ll have a go-to person to provide insights and guidance on a topic you and the rest of your employees might know little about. This can help you stay ahead of the disruption curve or at least ride it out in a decent position. What are the cons? The first involves cost. Paying for an IT professional isn’t cheap. Plus, it might be challenging to find a talented IT worker or team. An SHRM report found that 73 percent of leaders anticipate difficulty finding tech personnel. Of course, you might have the opposite problem, which is onboarding too many IT workers and creating a bloated IT department. This leaves you with a conundrum. Do you try to go it alone or email your favorite recruiter? The answer is actually a third choice which is to opt for a robust IT SaaS solution. That way, you can get the best of all worlds, including authority, availability, access, and affordability. Not only will you save money to put into other initiatives, but you’ll also still be able to disrupt with the best of them. This doesn’t negate the need for you to take some measures to ensure that you pick the right SaaS to keep your business running smoothly from a technical perspective. Before signing any contracts, make sure the software will give you the following advantages: 1. The Ability to Keep Your Customer Experience Strong Customer experience is everything these days. Take personalization, for instance. McKinsey research found that 71 percent of consumers expect personalized interactions with companies. Your SaaS should help you drive your personalization efforts by making it possible to set up automated communications that don’t feel robotic. How can you be sure your SaaS offers you the ability to provide custom engagements across your platform? Look at its capabilities. Often, SaaS systems will be able to integrate with other products you’re using, such as your customer relationship management system. The more options you have, the easier it will be to make customers feel like they’re getting white glove treatment. 2. Dashboards That Make Sense If you and the rest of your team members can’t figure out how to understand or work your SaaS, you’ll sink before you begin. You should have more than just visibility within your dashboards. Those dashboards need to make sense, too. A survey of U.K.-based businesses by CWJobs showed that just 27 percent of IT decision-makers were happy with their teams’ abilities to leverage the technology they had invested in. Could some of the problems be related to confusing tech? Don’t be fooled by promises from SaaS providers. Go through a demo and test-drive the software for free, if possible. Having an amazing IT program won’t be amazing if it’s too complicated to use. You’ll just end up hiring an IT employee to serve as a translator. 3. A History of Solid Uptime Downtime will always hurt your business operations. When outsourcing IT to one or more SaaS providers, you need to make sure they’re doing all they can to stay up and running. Otherwise, you could end up losing momentum and money -- and a lot of it. In 2021, ITIC found that just one hour of server downtime cost $300,000 for more than 90 percent of mid and large-size enterprises. One way to check how SaaS vendors handle and mitigate downtime is to read reviews. Avoid the reviews on their websites (they’ll always be glowing), and go to objective, third-party sources. Then, check out their service-level agreement (or SLA). Downtime is frequently mentioned in SLAs. 4. The Compliance Coverage You Need You’re probably going to see the word “compliant” a lot if you go to any SaaS product’s website. However, that’s a broad word. What’s important to one organization in terms of compliance and regulations might leave you unmoved -- and still exposed to unwanted repercussions. Remember: When Amazon can be fined about $888 million for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, no brand is immune. First, you should know what rules matter to you. Case in point, if you’re in the healthcare industry, you’re naturally going to be concerned about HIPAA. It’s best to do some homework. The last thing you want is to choose an IT SaaS that puts you at risk. Embarking on a digital transformation journey isn’t just for enterprise-level organizations. Smaller businesses can do it, too. And with the right software, you won’t have to add an IT department to become a disruptive force.
