Key Points: 

  • An application owner’s job is to ensure the company gets the most value possible out of an app.
  • For app owners to be successful, they need to have a combination of app visibility, time, and support from IT.
  • Torii allows IT to empower app owners with SaaS Management capabilities like critical insights into license utilization, contract details, usage trends, offboarding tasks, and more.
  • Torii integrations with common tools like Slack and Jira make app ownership easy by improving collaboration through familiar tools.

IT just needs some help.

With hundreds of apps (both sanctioned and unsanctioned) filling up your company’s browser tabs, IT can’t manage everything. But instead of hiring more IT staff, the best help comes from the app owners themselves.

What Is an Application Owner?

An application owner is the person responsible for managing important parts of an app. Often, this is someone who knows the app inside and out, but it might also be the person who first brought the app to the company. App owners understand the tool and make sure it works well for the company.

Sometimes, being an app owner is an official job role, but other times, it’s implied. It could be part of someone’s job description or a responsibility they’ve assumed over time. There isn’t just one way to become an app owner.

What Does an Application Owner Do?

The simple answer is that an application owner makes sure the company gets the most value out of its apps. They keep track of important information like:

  • What the app can do
  • How much the app costs
  • How often the app is used
  • Who is using the app
  • The terms of the app’s contract
  • How people feel about the app

With this information, the app owner can suggest actions or take action themselves. They might save the company money by ensuring licenses are being used efficiently and by removing access for people who no longer need it. They also help with important tasks like making sure data is safe and renewing contracts.

What Do App Owners Need to Be Successful?

For app owners to thrive, they need a few key elements:

  1. Visibility : App owners need a clear view of license usage, user activity, and application performance. Sometimes, this is visible within an admin dashboard within the app. Without these insights, managing and optimizing the app’s value is impossible.
  2. Time: The sheer volume of applications in today’s SaaS environment often overwhelms app owners. The same user is often responsible for more than one tool. When they lack the time to manage these apps, inefficiencies arise, and opportunities for optimization are lost.
  3. Support from IT: While IT cannot handle every aspect of app management alone, they play a crucial role in supporting app owners. IT must provide guidance, task lists, alerts, training and other forms of support to aid the app owners and ensure consistency.

SaaS Management for App Owners

Torii is the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) built for IT. That’s why we created a designated app owner role. With this role, IT can empower IT with the visibility, tools, and workflows to help them manage the myriad of tasks.

How Torii Lets IT Empower Application Owners 

Torii breaks down the silos of individual app admin views and unifies SaaS administration all in one place. So whether your app owner manages one app or ten apps, they can do it all within Torii’s sleek, intuitive UI, so every administrative action is visible to IT. 

App view

Torii’s Distributed SaaS Management Platform provides IT with a central SaaS System of Record for Shadow IT Discovery, SaaS Spend and Contract Renewals Management, and a fully integrated no-code workflow builder. These capabilities supercharge IT’s vision and ability to deal with the SaaS explosion. Still, we’ve added a designated role for Application owners so they can see insights—limited to their application—and take specific action. 

What Can Application Owners See in Torii?

The Application Owner role lets each app owner see the following information about their application: 

  • Users – Application owners can see a complete list of every user assigned a seat within that application
     
  • Usage – Owners can see usage rates both on an individual level and on aggregate
     
  • License Utilization – Looking to save budget? App owners can view license utilization rates for the application and which seats are going unused, unclaimed, or are still assigned to former employees
     
    • Bonus: These users can also view license tiers for different apps. i.e., a user with a costly Zoom pro license may never hold 60-minute meetings, not utilizing the full capabilities of their premium plan, and therefore can be downgraded to a free Zoom basic license 
       
  • Expenses – Owners can see all expenses in one place, contracts, license costs, and other add-ons
    spend view
  • Contracts – Application owners can view existing contract agreements or upload new contracts directly to Torii. With that visibility, application owners can better communicate the organization’s obligations to the software vendors, like duration and costs, and add these obligations to the organization’s total SaaS commitments.

    Contract view
  • Contacts – Point of contacts for renewal management both within their own company and the vendor’s 

What Actions Can App Owners Take in Torii?

With all those valuable insights, application owners can immediately increase productivity and decrease costs. 

User review
  • Onboarding – Depending on the application, Torii can either automatically onboard a new user based on whether they meet specific criteria in another app (i.e., someone is hired or shifts roles, and that change shows in a core app like Google Workspace, Okta, BambooHR, etc.) or it will trigger a workflow to automatically create a ticket assignment for an application owner to provide a license for the individual. 
     
  • Offboarding – In the same way, IT can decide the best action when someone is offboarded depending on the importance of the app and its contained IP. They can automatically reclaim the license, automatically suspend the license and allow the app owner to manually reclaim the license, or simply create the assignment for the application owner to reclaim the license. 
     
  • Reclaim Unused Licenses – Torii will automatically show application owners how many licenses are utilized, how many are idle, and how many are still assigned to past users. App owners can then take action to reclaim unused licenses and deprovision previous users. 
     
  • Downgrade Underutilized Licenses – For core and costly apps, downgrading multiple licenses can add to tremendous savings. For these apps, Torii will indicate which users are not using the tool to its expensive potential and let the app owner downgrade those users or send the users communication about downgrading their license. 
     
  • Upload, Edit, and Archive Vendor Contracts – To help Procurement, application owners can view, edit, upload, and archive contracts within Torii. 

Meeting App Owners Where They Work

To get tasks done efficiently, it’s important to meet app owners with the tools they already use, like Slack and Jira. By integrating Torii with these popular platforms, IT can ensure that tasks are more likely to be completed on time and with less hassle.

For example, when someone leaves the company, Torii can send a Slack message directly to the app owner, detailing the offboarding tasks they need to complete. This message includes a link to a live task list in Torii, where app owners can mark tasks as done as they work through them.

Using Slack, app owners get simple reminders about what they need to do, keeping everything in one place so they don’t forget anything important. This approach boosts the chances of tasks being completed quickly and accurately. IT also benefits from better visibility into task progress, reducing the need for constant follow-ups and ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

By using tools like Slack and Jira, IT can make it easier for app owners to manage their responsibilities, leading to better task completion rates, more efficient workflows, and a more organized way to handle the growing number of apps in the company.

App Owners Scale Distributed SaaS Management

Most IT professionals prefer to maintain a somewhat centralized IT department. But, this doesn’t inherently scale with the growth of an organization or its applications. With empowered application owners, the IT department can have its cake and eat it too.

These owners become the front line of defense against security threats and the best way to find cost savings. All with minimal added burden on the IT department. 

For IT leaders, empowering and working with app owners becomes a strategic focal point to distribute the responsibility of SaaS Management without sacrificing oversight or visibility. 

It allows IT to close the loop and administer apps without taking ownership from the users.

If you’d like to learn more about Torii’s exciting vision of Distributed SaaS Management, you can download the Distributed SaaS Management Playbook or request a demo and see firsthand how Torii helps you help your organization thrive.