Digital Transformation may have become the moniker of the modern Technology leader, but having spent my career focused on digitally-led transformations, the last ten years have shown me the power that this can really wield inside an organization.
However, what’s becoming increasingly obvious is that in a transformed world — if that really exists and we aren’t in perpetual transformation — is that in the promise of making things simpler for end users, the world of the CIO has become more and more complex. This is no more so than in the world of SaaS.
In its earliest days, SaaS promised a whole new world and raft of opportunities and simplicity. While it’s hard to disagree that we are in a better place than we were before, the proliferation of the number of applications employees need or want to use seems to be endless.
And herein lies the challenge. As CIOs and leaders at the heart of change, we want to make sure they have best-in-class tools for the businesses employees power – but the rate of that change and proliferation of apps is getting harder to manage. Be it new apps in the marketplace, or with old apps transforming and getting new features to muscle into competitor’s spaces, making sense of what is best for any organization or employee is hard.
Employees are rightly demanding more and better to deliver great outcomes for their businesses. After all, haven’t we been through the consumerization of workplace technology and don’t we live in a mobile-first world?
From a management and security perspective, the proliferation of apps and the demands of an organization are at loggerheads with keeping the enterprise secure and operating efficiently. Budgets are being squeezed now more than ever. In our hearts we want to serve the needs of all our employees, but in our heads, this can’t roll on endlessly.
SaaS may have democratized the enterprise, but until Productiv there hasn’t been any way for technologists to understand exactly how SaaS is transforming the business — and that is why I’ve joined the company.
I joined because it is clear to me that Productiv gives CIOs the insights they need to allow them to focus on real, measurable business outcomes. With better data on usage and adoption and more automation of everyday tasks, CIOs and their teams get more time to focus on projects and initiatives that actually deliver on the business’s wider goals. And Productiv actually enables that — it makes life simpler, easier, and more transparent and most importantly returns the conversation to how we deliver a world-class employee experience alongside growing our businesses.
Before Productiv, success metrics, deployment metrics, and even purchasing decisions were often heavily influenced by vendors themselves. But the transparent data points and metrics provided in the platform give these forward-thinking CIOs the ability to better shepherd their transformations.
With Productiv, the question is no longer “Should I use OneDrive or Box,” but “How are our collaboration apps being used across the business” or “Is there successful collaboration in a particular business unit that we can replicate across the business,” creating a better employee experience and ultimately driving better business outcomes.
I’ve been an early adopter of tools like Slack, Zoom, Okta, and Box — and Productiv is in their class. Those companies were on the bleeding edge and they changed the way we work. Productiv is now doing that, but it’s changing the way CIOs work to drive business outcomes, and I have a passion for it.
And while we now have transparent data into all these platforms through our platform, we also have transparency in the money we spend on them, and they key indicators we need for compliance and security. Productiv lives and breathes this journey 24/7.
I’m a few weeks in now, and the stand out thing for me in that timeframe has been the relentless pace of innovation at the company and the vision that Jody, Munish, and Ashish have built. Time to get Productiv! (Sorry :-))