In just about every organization, IT is in transition. Once a cost center focused on infrastructure, hardware and application maintenance, IT is becoming like any other asset with a vital, strategic role in the businesses it serves - it must compete for investment dollars and demonstrate tangible business returns.

With the strategic use of technology, IT can help organizations improve and transform business processes, react quickly to changing market conditions, comply with new federal regulations, cut cost of operations, reduce product time to market, and enhance employee mobility and flexibility.

IT departments used to operate in a vacuum, disconnected from their companies’ larger objectives and business processes and lacking consistent goals, procedures, controls and best practices of their own. But two emerging trends are enabling IT departments to operate more strategically. They are (I) The increasing and well-documented emphasis on IT alignment and governance, and (II) The convergence of software and services through the rise of software as a service (SaaS)

This white paper takes a close at how these forces are working together to reshape IT in the 21st century. Acknowledging that both trends are still evolving, it suggests that the nature of SaaS in particular is rapidly changing as more organizations gain experience with it - and that the level of service expected of IT software and service providers is much greater than it was a few years ago.