It was interesting to hear an Accenture case study yesterday that illustrates how SaaS changes the whole character of its engagements. Speaking at a NetSuite customer event in London, Saideep Raj of Accenture's global SaaS practice, gave an example of a project where go-live happened exceptionally early in the implementation cycle — less than two weeks after the project started — and the system was then developed iteratively over the remaining months of the project [disclosure: NetSuite and other relevant companies are recent or current clients].
This contrasts with the conventional pattern in which the implementation is developed first and only goes live once it has been completed. Raj reported that the more iterative development model allowed business stakeholders to 'test-run' functionality during development and get a lot closer to what they really needed by the end of the project. The client, a global high tech company, is now converted to this development model for all future projects. The project in question, which aimed to improve communications with its partner channel, was judged a success when it helped achieve 10,000 extra new leads per month.
The case study was presented as an example of how the cloud is transforming the professional services organization. But as I've written elsewhere, I felt there's a lot more companies like Accenture will have to do before they really start taking advantage of all the potential of cloud computing.
The one difference Raj mentioned, almost in passing, was that this new model requires dev tools that run in the cloud. But he didn't mention any of the consequential impacts that has on how a professional services organization manages its resources (some of which I've covered in previous posts and various assorted podcasts. For example, taking advantage of remote access and web conferencing to allow consultants to work on several projects in tandem instead of having downtime while they're stuck on a client site waiting for a decision or feedback from the client before they can continue their work. That in turn has implications for how consultants' time is managed and how the project management process has to work.
Some insight into the more fundamental changes that flow from these differences would have been highly illuminating, but none were forthcoming. Perhaps that's because (I'm just guessing here) Accenture hasn't yet changed its operations to benefit from working in the cloud.
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