I’ve just returned from my last business trip of the year. This time I was in Washington, DC, hosting the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud computing and managed services track of NetworkWorld’s IT Roadmap event.

The keynote speaker at the event was Bechtel Corporation’s CIO, Geir Ramleth, who gave a fascinating talk about how his IT team is transforming the way Bechtel leverages technology and business applications by modeling their operations on YouTube, Google, Amazon.com and Salesforce.com, rather than traditional enterprise organizations.

Ramleth has recognized that these on-demand service providers are delivering high-value solutions in an amazingly low cost fashion, making them the envy of CIOs at many of the greatest companies in the world.

Although Ramleth’s team has decided that today’s commercially available SaaS and cloud computing solutions don’t meet their corporate requirements, they still felt the operating model of today’s on-demand service providers is worth imitating.

Ramleth’s presentation echoed many of the ideas which THINKstrategies has been advocating for the past seven years. His team recognized the ease of use and operating efficiencies of consumer-oriented web-services and SaaS vendors, and decided to benchmark their internal operations based on these successful models. As a result, they have not only increased end-user productivity, but dramatically reduced their operating costs.

Click here to read more about Bechtel’s transformation process.