Stop running your own power plant: how SaaS cuts IT costs

A century ago, a factory that wanted electricity built its own power plant. It hired engineers to run it, bought the fuel, and fixed it when it broke. None of that had anything to do with making shoes or steel. It was simply the price of keeping the lights on.

Then the electric utilities arrived. Within a generation, almost nobody generated their own power. They plugged into the grid and went back to making shoes.

A lot of IT shops are still running the power plant.

TCO is eating your lunch

Legacy environments come with invisible price tags: aging servers, operating system licenses, patch cycles, and staff hours spent just keeping the lights on. None of it improves a single service.

SaaS platforms like ServiceNow, Appian, and Salesforce take the infrastructure and operating system layers off your plate. Is the subscription free? No. But once you count the hidden costs, it's often less than maintaining everything yourself, and your people get their time back.

Technical debt is a policy problem

Every outdated system is a bottleneck to change. A new regulation, a new policy, a new customer demand: each one waits in line behind the system nobody dares touch.

Platforms help because they let you automate workflows, enforce standards, and pull data out of its silos without building everything from scratch.

You probably already own it

Here's the part nobody likes to hear: you likely already have the licenses.

In my experience, most organizations use a fraction of what they're paying for. Before you buy anything new, find out what's sitting unused in the platforms you have. On one federal program, consolidating onto a single platform let us retire three separate service management systems.

Better tech, better experience

When services are faster, more reliable, and easier to navigate, IT isn't the only winner. Think digital permit applications, proactive service notifications, and self-service that works. That's an experience the public and your customers will choose to use.

One caution: check the fit

SaaS is not a magic wand, and the bill can get away from you in four ways.

• Too many licenses. Seats assigned to people who left, or who never logged in once.
• The wrong kind of licenses. Premium tiers for people who only ever submit a request or click "approve."
• Too many platforms. A dozen subscriptions bought by a dozen departments will rebuild the same mess you just escaped, this time in someone else's data center.
• Too much platform. This is the one people miss. If you bought an enterprise platform and use it as a ticketing system, you're driving a semi truck to pick up groceries.

That last one is not automatically a mistake. A big platform makes sense when you have a roadmap to grow into it, with new workflows and new departments coming on board each quarter. That's continuous transformation doing its job.

But if there's no roadmap, be honest about it. Either build one, or downgrade to something that fits. Capability you never use is just overhead.

Modernization isn't a moonshot

It's a mindset. Lower cost of ownership, less technical debt, and a serious CX glow-up. That's a win in every direction.

Now go turn off the power plant.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.