From the monthly archives:

March 2010

SaaS does not require just as much IT support

by Michael Krupa on March 17, 2010

On episode 45 of the Bill Kutik Radio show, Bill Kutik interviewed Jason Averbook and Jason Corsello regarding the HR year past and coming up.  During the show the topic turned technical and Bill Kutik brought up the topic of whether SaaS will become the dominant delivery method for HR applications.  In answering the question, Jason Averbook discussed the myth that you do not need IT help when implementing SaaS application. Spot on commentary by Jason until he says:

Software as a Service requires just as much IT support as any of these other solutions. It’s a different kind of IT support, a different skill set.

Sorry Jason but I am going to have to disagree with you on this point. SaaS applications do not require as much IT support as on-premise solutions.  Let take a look at the typical IT tasks for supporting on premise vendor application and note the tasks that are also needed for SaaS applications:

IT Task (performed by customer) On Premise SaaS
Perform capacity planning for new servers in company datacenter to host on premise software X
Purchase and install servers in Datacenter (install operating system, power, networking, monitoring, fail over, disaster recovery, security) X
Install application on servers X
Install database software, load database and manage ongoing database needs (space, performance) X
Customize application per business processes X
Create inbound and outbound interfaces X X
Apply application Tax updates, New features and patches X
Apply technology upgrade and patches X
Test tax update, new features and patches X X
Work with IT Change Management organization to implement changes into Production X

My experience with SaaS applications show that you no longer need IT Datacenter support, Database Administration support, Application Infrastructure support and Application Development support (with the exception of interfaces).  Poof.  Gone. No longer needed.  Depending on the number of resources either partially or fully engaged to support your on-premise application, this could be a sizable reduction in the resources needed as you shift to SaaS.

Agree? Disagree?  Leave a comment and let me know.

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A Fairly Simple Explanation of RSS

by Michael Krupa on March 8, 2010

This guest post is authored by Ben Eubanks. Ben is an HR professional from Huntsville, AL. He lives much of his life online. Don’t believe it? Catch him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via email. His blog, UpstartHR, is about many things, including human resources, leadership, and ninjas.

If you’re not familiar with RSS, I have a fairly simple explanation for you.

RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest. You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed – you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

People use RSS every day to help them read the news and stay on top of new topics. I think RSS has some benefits for the workplace, too, but this quote from Oscar Berg tells us why RSS is not being adopted in the workplace (yet):

The same reasoning applies to RSS – there is no other way to fully understand the benefits of RSS. Although it is quite easy to explain the benefits of RSS when compared to traditonal information seeking, you will not truly understand these benefits until you let RSS change your own consumption patterns. When you have done this, it is fairly easy to translate these benefits to a business context and to envision how RSS could be used within an enterprise context.

My RSS success story

I can still remember the first time I used RSS. It was amazing. It was soon after I really started getting into reading and following blogs online. Every morning I opened up 10 tabs in Firefox and checked my favorite sites one by one to see if there were any updates. After a week or two of doing that, I realized I could sign up for email updates. That cut down on my visits to the sites, but then it cluttered up my inbox, taking time from things that needed to be replied to.

Then I discovered RSS. I had been using Gmail for a few months and clicked over to my Google Reader for the first time to see what it was. I realized that I could add the feeds for each of the sites I followed and it would collect them to view in one place. I was blown away. Where I had been spending maybe 30 minutes a day typing URLs and looking to see if any of the sites had any new content I was now able to just open my RSS reader and start browsing. I cut my time down to 10 minutes a day with that simple step. From then on I was hooked!

Taking RSS to work

Now for the hard part. How can I use RSS feeds at work to save me time and effort? To be honest, I’m still trying to figure this one out. I have some ideas, though…

  • News (professional development, baby!)
  • Team updates (what’s everyone working on?)
  • Project updates (great way to document a project timeline)
  • Set up a special shared tag in Google Reader and share all items in that with your team
  • Open job updates (recruiters?)
  • New employee feed (orientation?)

I just scraped these from my cranium with a little effort. There are so many great tools for using RSS feeds. Do you know of more? How could you use RSS at work?

Image by Paul Watson.

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