BPM-EAI

Let us analyze the situation with a perspective

Company X has gone for these SaaS applications for different specialize functional areas for example a SaaS based application for CRM, Product Management (which includes pricing), eCommerce (Ordering), Order Management, Billing and After Sales Support. Considering each of these functional areas is specialized area it made perfect sense for Company X to go for different SaaS offering for each of their functional areas. I think this holds good for COTS based strategy too for on-premise deployment.

And at the same time there are customer facing end to end processes (for both on-premise and SaaS deployment) like "Prospect To Cash" which are customer touch point based process which make use of services from each functional area to meet customer need. These are sometimes are referred as Operational processes.

Now the question is how does organization manage these when nothing is on-premise?

In my view to manage this, IT should align itself to business to manage its Key performance indicators (KPI) rather than focusing on application architecture.

Either in an on-premise deployment or SaaS based deployment these functional and operational process areas are typically governed by Functional and Operational KPIs, which IT should provide as Management Information dashboard to business.

Example of a Functional KPIs is for product management functional area is "time to market" of new products or "number of product variance introduced". And similarly example of operational KPI is "cycle time" for "Prospect to Cash" process.

Hence for a SaaS based deployment where the application architecture control is minimal it is important for organization to have clarity on the functional and operational KPI based on business goals and manage these set of SaaS applications through these KPI's. To do this the key elements that organization should have in place are

• High-level Process views for both functional and operational process (typically till L2 level)
• Business Goals broken down to Business KPI and aligned to each functional and operational process areas
• Enterprise Data models which would drive 
• Operational data stores to create management information report for the established KPI
• Data acquisition from each SaaS application with appropriate mapping to create accurate report
• Standardized data payload definition for Service based integration of each functional to realize a smooth integration required for end to end operational process
• A common integration platform that should provide the integration fabric required for realizing the end to end process. Which in turn should be utilized to create the BAM view for the end to end operational process
• And at the end a BAM view over the functional Process to manage the process performance within each functional area. For which Organization should demand the real time KPI view from the SaaS vendors

However for SaaS based deployment data security should be the foremost concern that organization should address first and then look at the KPI based approach to manage the SaaS application landscape.