Is there a gap between your customer mission / needs, and IT mission / service delivery capabilities? How can the SaaS IT PPMS tools help you close that gap? Well, for starters, we may consider some advantages of SaaS based PPMS tools such as Daptiv and AtTask.

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• Deployment speed
• Low support requirements
• Cost effectiveness for small-medium deployments

Now, couple this with SaaS based BPMS modeling, simulation and testing in the Cloud for forecasting and needs discovery to improve a product or service process, and we have a quick on ramp for SaaS based PPMS to drive the project management deliverables, and SaaS BPMS to model, simulate and test the business process in the Cloud for say, IT as a service, or a repeatable process for modeling, simulation and testing of bioinformatics sequencing as conducted by Eli Lilly & Company.

Eli Lilly recently launched a 64-machine cluster computer to work on bioinformatics sequencing, completed the work, and shut down in 20 minutes incurring a total cost of $6.40 using Amazon’s EC2 service vs. what would have been a 12 weeks process internally.

And this is today, just imagine the next wave of cloud computing – intelligent, autonomic clouds with adaptive SaaS / PaaS / IaaS applications / platforms / infrastructure that “sense” and respond to users, instantly adapting modules within the applications auto-populating elements of plans from similar activities, adapting platform requirements, offering cross cloud interconnects for modeling, simulation and testing, capturing requirements to execute such modeling and instantly adapting its platform and infrastructure to requirements through capacity on demand, grid computing, virtualization, and other technologies to accommodate that subscriber’s temporary (project) mission requirements (though iterative process), and then release those resources upon completion.

There isn’t a gap, there is a growing chasm, between client missions which require shortest time to market, cost effective, high quality, competitive solutions, and traditional IT business project, program, portfolio, and process management systems, tools, and methods.

While there are definite distinctions between PPM and BPM, not the least of which is the temporary and unique nature of projects vs. the ongoing operational nature of business processes, there are also similarities and an increasing a symbiotic relationship between these worlds.

The application of BPM to IT processes can provide for more streamlined IT processes, which can be leveraged by PPM in more efficient and timely project execution. Similarly, PPM can be applied to BPM in new process creation, and progressive elaboration of iterative (temporal) processes.

Given the cloud computing paradigm, we can see from the Eli Lilly example above that 12 weeks vs. 20 minutes is a significant order of magnitude change in the way the next wave of business will be conducted, and that will require a new way of thinking about, planning, executing, and managing, iterative (if temporal) business processes and projects.

Cloud computing represents a revolution in the speed of business execution, and I suspect that the cloud computing technologies will continue to evolve and advance at a pace that is faster than most businesses can adapt their processes and train their people.

This presents a business and technological inflection point that will be advantageous to cloud computing companies and organizations in the public and private sector with visionary leaders that will recognize the technological chasm that lies ahead.

Only those organizations with the visionary leadership and IT mission aligned to meet the needs of its customer mission at the speeds and economies provided by the cloud computing paradigm will cross that chasm into a new world of business conducted in ways we can barely imagine today.