Is the marketing department's tendency to bypass the IT department a model that the rest of the company will soon follow? When you combine the central role played by Salesforce.com, software-as-a-service and comfortable arrangements between vendors and marketing folks, there's little need for IT to support the technologies, writes Dan Woods in a post at Forbes.

The technology used by the marketing department resembles consumer tech more than traditional business tech, Woods writes. The tools they use can be used easily by non-technical people. What's more, marketing often involves short-term activities "that come and go quickly and leave no lasting footprint," and the budget is spent accordingly.

For the rest of the company, however, this arrangement isn't likely to work. Marketing technology vendors have made their automated processes "fundamentally similar," but this isn't the case for business processes in other areas, which vary considerably according to industry and product.

"About two-thirds of the sales volume of business software is spent on niche solutions, not on products from the large vendors. So, even with the ease of deployment that comes from the SaaS model, there is just not going to be one solution that fits every need," Woods writes.  

Even though companies are relying more heavily on SaaS, they aren't buying the same set of products or using them in the same way. To integrate it, the IT team will continue to play a role.

For more:
- see Dan Woods's post at Forbes

Related Articles:
Insights into SaaS, cloud-based services
Chiquita CIO on business case for SaaS
Advice for CIOs facing commoditized IT