What is ICT Service

Most organizations today are looking for more cost effective approaches to delivering enterprise applications to their user base. Among the alternatives that are becoming increasingly popular are various forms of e-collaboration that involve the sharing of information between organizations, integration of interenterprise business processes among partner organizations, and the delivery of software services by external application service providers (ASPs). Such recent trends are likely to produce a situation where most enterprise applications will be implemented collaboratively or supplied as services, making the Software-as-a-Service model the dominant method of enterprise application delivery. The extensive use of externally supplied software and information services will change the shape of the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) market and impact on management decisions about the deployment of enterprise ICT (Harber, 2004). These changes will affect both user organizations and organizations supplying ICT products and services. In this paper we analyze the above trends and discuss the impact of the Software-as-a-Service model on ICT user organizations and ICT suppliers. We first discuss the key enterprise computing trends and the strategic importance of ICT.