ENHANSING SERVICE DELIVERY CAPABILITIES USING ISM AND KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK: LEARNINGS FROM SAP-LAP

Abstract

Cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms are becoming increasingly prevalent as organizations globally are focusing on rationalization of their IT budgets and infrastructure maintenance is a key cost area. Cloud adoption enables organizations to transfer all their risks associated with Infrastructure maintenance to cloud service provider at significantly lower cost as compared to on premise infrastructure. As a result cloud business has acquired strategic importance for software product companies and last few years has witnessed an increasing trend of product offerings on hosted/cloud platforms to expand and retain customer base. With such huge potential in cloud offerings, the expectations of customers are far higher than the traditional on premise models A typical end to end cloud service delivery of any software product/solution involves participation of multiple cross functional teams with varied background and capabilities and with their own process frameworks and knowledge level at times. The product support facet and service support facet of any SaaS (Software as a Service) delivery offering involves complex interplay of actors and processes which cause emergence of turbulent situations and are often difficult to handle and result in inefficiency and a perception of redundancy. Such a complex interplay also mandates proper knowledge management across the cross functional teams so as to ensure that the service delivery and quality is enhanced in an incremental way resulting in customer delight. An eclectic mix of process improvement and knowledge management strategy ensures near elimination of people specific dependency and continuous and sustained improvement in service quality. The case in question is a typical example of intricacies involved in establishing and sustaining SaaS (Software as a Service) Cloud services and associated issues in a long term horizon. The aim of this report is to analyze the problems in overall service delivery quality of a Cloud service product company and proposing solutions for the same using the LAP-SAP, ISM, DMAIC and Knowledge Management frameworks.