We use 3rd party services/SaaS subscriptions accross both delivery teams and in the wider business. The services we use range from monitoring sytems for customers to trello plugins to improve roadmapping.
There are a number of reasons why as a business need to formalise how we track this data.
- We want to do a much better job of charging these expenses back to customers where appropriate
- We want to avoid spending excessive amounts of money per month on third party services, without a clear idea of how many of these subscriptions are active and in use, and which are defunct.
- It's desirable to keep some standardisation around the tools we're using. People often join with personal preferences of different tools, many of which have merit and value. We're looking to avoid duplication in having many tools performing similar or the same job.
- As we work with increasingly large organisations, we need to demonstrate that we have the correct measures in place to protect our data, our customer's data, and our customer's customers data
This is not intended to place barriers in the way of teams having access to the tools they need to function. We believe keeping these records form part of our best practices as a business and ensure we operate in the most transparent and responsible way possible.