Gregory Spehar, Mitusis Consulting Inc.
More and more enterprises are adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) “Cloud” applications. These applications are developed and maintained with an Agile Methodology, increasing their quality and performance. How can an Enterprise integrate these SaaS systems in an effective manner without significant risk to the organization and a decrease in application/process quality? An agile data migration and process integration methodology can be defined to ensure a high probability of success with the highest quality delivery when integrating a new system into a corporate environment.
Many of the new applications being developed today are cloud-based SaaS1 applications developed using agile methodologies that are used by multiple customers or clients. These SaaS applications need to be integrated into the corporate environment in a logical and methodical manner utilizing agile methodologies to ensure that the client organization can meet their performance needs. The problem that needs to be solved is the solution a SaaS application has defined will only include 50% to 80% of the processes implemented by the client organization. For the client organization to fully utilize the SaaS software all impacted processes must be migrated or changed. With the use of change management techniques as well as a thorough understanding of the SaaS agile process, an agile data migration and process integration methodology can be defined to ensure a high probability of success while minimizing the disruption.
This approach was utilized on a Portland based organization, which allowed them to establish their go-live date and meet that date with minimal process impact. This agile integration approach can be standardized and utilized with any organization that is struggling to tame their data migration and process integration efforts into a vendor’s agile SaaS implementation.
Target audience: Intermediate
Gregory Spehar, 2014 Technical Paper, Paper, Slides
