Cutting through the noise: A CIO's framework for smart adoption

As the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a legacy-rich enterprise making its way through the changing digital landscape, Shobhana Lele possesses an experienced and strategic perspective on the enterprise SaaS evaluation landscape. As a leading CIO, she propagates harmonizing on-prem and hybrid systems with cloud or SaaS solutions—a balancing act that is vital for organizations still very much in the symposium of legacy operations but seeking to act like the agile modern organization.

- Aanchal Ghatak

In this interview, Shobhana Lele elaborates on how organizations can navigate the dense SaaS ecosystem of vendors by using a structured framework application—functional, technical, commercial—while developing weightage comparisons and robust exit strategies. Lele discusses how her organization uses governance to control costs, manage SaaS sprawl, and ultimately maintain long-term value while adding some detail on evaluating Generative AI capabilities, and protecting enterprise data, integration, and supplier dependencies.

Enterprise SaaS is now foundational—but also crowded. How do you evaluate SaaS vendors today? What are your non-negotiables when bringing one into your enterprise ecosystem?

It is true that there are a multitude of options available today for many SaaS products. A functional, technical and commercial comparison is the best approach. As part of the comparison, we identify and evaluate various parameters by assigning them weightages. One of the most important criteria for a SaaS product is the exit process. The product must be able to provide an offline accessible backup when the organization decides to discontinue it. The second one is its support and partner ecosystem. Reference checks help to validate the commitments.

As a CIO, how do you balance the push for cloud-native SaaS platforms with the reality of existing on-prem or hybrid systems?