Cutting through the noise: A CIO’s framework for smart adoption

As the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a legacy-rich enterprise making its way through the changing digital landscape, Shobhana Lele possesses an experienced and strategic perspective on the enterprise SaaS evaluation landscape. As a leading CIO, she propagates harmonising on-prem and hybrid systems with cloud or SaaS solutions—a balancing act that is vital for organisations still very much in the symposium of legacy operations but seeking to act like the agile modern organisation.

In this interview, Shobhana Lele elaborates on how organizations can navigate the dense SaaS ecosystem of vendors by using a structured framework application—functional, technical, commercial—while developing weightage comparisons and robust exit strategies. Lele discusses how her organization uses governance to control costs, manage SaaS sprawl, and ultimately maintain long-term value while adding some detail on evaluating Generative AI capabilities, and protecting enterprise data, integration, and supplier dependencies.

Enterprise SaaS is now foundational—but also crowded. How do you evaluate SaaS vendors today? What are your non-negotiables when bringing one into your enterprise ecosystem?

It is true that there are a multitude of options available today for many SaaS products. A functional, technical and commercial comparison is the best approach. As part of the comparison, we identify and evaluate various parameters by assigning them weightages. One of the most important criteria for a SaaS product is the exit process. The product must be able to provide an offline accessible backup when the organization decides to discontinue it. The second one is its support and partner ecosystem. Reference checks help to validate the commitments.

One of the most important criteria for a SaaS product is the exit process. The product must provide an offline-accessible backup when the organisation decides to discontinue it.

As a CIO, how do you balance the push for cloud-native SaaS platforms with the reality of existing on-prem or hybrid systems?

The benefits of cloud have been proven in terms of availability, scalability and performance. What needs to be managed is the costs. This should be done with regular governance in terms of monitoring and archiving. As long as the risks are mitigated and the business gets its process benefits, it should not matter whether the application is on cloud, on prem or co-located. As IT we must ensure long-term benefits and manage the associated security, risk and compliances effectively.

With the proliferation of SaaS tools, are we entering an era of “SaaS sprawl”? How are you addressing application redundancy and integration fatigue?

Yes, it’s possible. Today for every problem, the solution is an “app”. This happens when the requirements are addressed in an adhoc manner and “shadow IT” takes precedence. There is a definite need to harmonize and collate business requirements and address them through consolidated platforms rather than opting for various systems for every requirement. Although this may look lengthy in the beginning, it will prove to optimize not only costs but will also bring in process efficiencies.

We’re seeing a wave of GenAI-enhanced SaaS tools. Are these features truly adding enterprise value, or do you see them as premature or gimmicky right now?

I would say they are still evolutionary and depend on the type of industry and the quality of underlying data. They would most definitely add value in the long-term but they need to be assessed and selected carefully.

What’s your take on building vs. buying GenAI capabilities within core business apps—should SaaS partners be the AI layer, or do you foresee more control in-house?

Business Apps must come embedded with AI functionality. That helps the AI to interface with the app data directly. In-house controls need Infrastructure that can scale, therefore only when there is a definite need and benefit or a regulatory requirement, organizations could look at in-house infrastructure.

SaaS once promised predictable pricing, but many CIOs now face rising costs and vendor lock-in. How are you managing long-term contracts and ensuring value from your SaaS partners?

This is a big risk that SaaS platforms come with. Hence it is required to select a platform that is dependable, has reputed clientele and build long-term price contracts. Needless to add, always have an exit clause which gives you the data in an accessible app in case there is a need to part ways.

With core enterprise data flowing through third-party SaaS platforms, how do you ensure data ownership, compliance, and security—especially in industries like textiles and manufacturing?

To a large extent this is an industry agnostic problem. The manufacturing industry has to take extra precautions to expose its IT/OT data if the SaaS platform uses it. It is not advisable and a via media mechanism needs to be worked out if it is an absolute must. It is important to agree on terms of engagement before a formal project begins. This includes data backup at regular intervals, business continuity procedures, third party audits at pre-defined frequency, facilitation of SOC I and II reports, etc.

If you could design the next-generation enterprise SaaS platform, what would it do differently—from integration to intelligence?

What I would like to see is passing on benefits of economies of scale to customers. Secondly, the ecosystem for support of the platform needs to be strong. Many SaaS vendors do not have partners and then sustaining the platform becomes a big issue. Intelligence has to be now embedded in all apps and is given.

aanchalg@cybermedia.co.in