Is there a fit for SaaS in the government?
Given all the economic and government policy hoopla, it’s no surprise that some are tackling the issue of if and how SaaS can impact government IT. Clearly, government adopting SaaS has significant benefits with a dose of security related fears, but overall, I see the government leveraging SaaS as a net win. One thing that interests me more, however, isn’t so much whether government can benefit from consuming external SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, but instead, whether opportunities exist for government to leverage SaaS architecture for internal, “home brew” applications.
Let’s use the U.S. government as a discussion point. In 2005, the federal government was a sprawling institution of 3.3 million civil servant and military personnel with 10 million other works that were direct government contracts and “grant workers,” for a total direct and indirect workforce of 14.6 million people! Clearly, we haven’t included state and local government in this mix, but I think you get the picture; the numbers are staggering. These millions of employees leverage software every day. For many scenarios, generally available SaaS offerings like Salesforce.com will fill many needs, but the government ecosystem also requires a massive number of niche applications to help in very specific tasks. For example, consider managing parking tickets or traffic violations. Generally speaking, custom software would be used for this task. The internal market for niche applications is just as staggering as the raw employment numbers.
So how does SaaS play into all of this? Let’s consider much of internal government IT functions at this point. If some municipality needs a software package to manage traffic violations, it either (a) writes it or (b) contracts a consultant to write it and then runs that software on some server it owns or leases. The municipality next door has a similar need and pursues a similar path. You can extrapolate this process to many different municipalities, each with their own on-premises solution. The fact of the matter is, many will have the same or extraordinarily similar requirements when it comes to their traffic violation systems. What you end up with is a generally unnecessary gross over allocation of resources. Each municipality is maintaining infrastructure and code on its own, resulting in pressure on the IT budget, inefficiency in terms of delivery and maintenance, and general headaches.
These niche applications are completly warranted in terms of functional need, but can SaaS help with the delivery and save the government time, money and effort? Absolutely! SaaS is often overlooked as an intra-enterprise (i.e. private cloud) deployment model. For example, considering the common functional overlap for our traffic violation app, as well as the lack of strategic value associated with hosting the app themselves, municipalities would benefit from “banding together” or relying on a super-scope governmental body (think the county or state governments in the U.S.) and having the application written once and delivered as a service to each municipality. Furthermore, this model could be extrapolated to a number of applications, allowing the centralized management and delivery of applications, as well as governmental standardization. This would create huge savings for the government, allow for an unbelievably flexible sharing and deployment model, and get rid of waste. I’m excited to see SaaS architectures materialize within organizations as a viable model that changes the way these organizations write and consumer internal software.
What’s your opinion? Is SaaS only beneficial to the government from a consumption point of view, or is the
idea of leveraging the delivery model on a “private cloud” for internal applications equally (if not more) powerful?
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I do think there is a role for SaaS in the government. I think properly written SaaS applications scale better, deploy easier, and are more lower TCO whether its for the government or the private sector.
I might be slightly biased though…
Well certainly SaaS could play a role that is beneficial. One would have to take the risk mitigations which would need to be considered before being deploying on a massive scale to replace the government’s current infrastructure.
However having said that and being involved in the SaaS industry, I too must admit that I am excited on seeing the future of cloud computing being incorporated to more industries.
Our coverage of the public sector is starting to find evidence of SaaS used on private clouds for internal use. The best example so far can be found in the state of North Carolina. Here’s a link to our story: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/693860
Despite this excellent example, however, issues around risk and security continue to delay entry into this field by public CIOs.
It will be interesting to see whether federal CIO Vivek Kundra is able to surmount the challenges going forward.
Tod Newcombe
Editor
Public CIO Magazine
Tod thanks for the insight; as you mentioned there are several issues that continue to delay the entry into the field but as experience continues to prove time and time again these issues are more Myth than reality (not to say that some do pose a legitimate concern).
It will be interesting to see how things develop with this new administration at the federal level but certainly how other states follow the example of North Carolina.
Cheers,
Abe Sultan
Sinclair
I went through a process of negotiating and selling SaaS to government recently and chronicled the experience in my blog with some ideas for vendors
http://www.prudentcloud.com/saas/saas-government-20062009/
Might be useful for your readers.
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Let’s take SAAS Payroll. I think Government or Semi Government Organizations can make use of SAAS to automate payroll quickly.
Usually the amount of resistance towards change or in other words transition from traditional process to streamlined automated process @ Government establishments may require more time.
Since SAAS is a ready to use application, which require no or less customization, time required to deliver would be less and implementation can happen on a fast pace and hence training and familiarization. Over and above cost factor is also in favor of the customer here…so budget may not be a constraint
Anybody interested to try SAAS Payroll, you are welcome
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