Search for savings in SLM and accelerate your transformation

Recent events spurred forth by the COVID-19 pandemic have been putting a massive strain on IT teams. If you’re experiencing budget reductions, a downward slope in employee headcount, and an overall decline in revenue, you’re not alone. Right now, businesses are reeling from a sudden halt in growth and looking for any internal costs that can be reduced or optimized in order to weather the storm brought by COVID-19.

In a situation like this, IT teams – and the organization at large – tend to look to the CIO for guidance. This enhanced pressure to generate savings has put CIOs in a difficult spot. In the world of IT, cost savings aren’t always free for the taking - and when you don’t allocate time and resources into cost-savings measures, costs can quickly expand. For instance, software spend tends to passively creep up 8-10 percent year-over-year, and without a concerted effort, your costs will only increase.

This can be mitigated by Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) – the practice designed to eliminate wasteful consumption by finding inefficiencies in your current software environment. Technology and commercial issues are more closely interlinked than many realize, with visibility being a primary concern. The average organization has at least 14 times more instances of cloud services running than the CIO thinks – resulting in organizations wasting millions on solutions that bring little-to-no benefit.

However, finding these connections can be complicated. Let’s take a look at how to quickly identify potential areas of savings in your software environment through high-quality SLM.

Do any of these situations feel familiar?

If you’re experiencing significant challenges due to recent market conditions, you’re probably feeling great pressure to generate savings and recoup revenue as quickly and efficiently as possible. As a CIO, or someone close to one, you might be feeling the weight of a few different scenarios. Let’s lay them out.

1. Knowing the influence IT teams have on efficiency and business growth, you feel the urgent need to have your voice heard in the context of organizational cost savings initiatives. Unfortunately, those outside of the IT team don’t totally understand where you’re coming from.
2. You don’t want these cost reduction initiatives to be solely about cutting costs – you see an opportunity to invest in the acceleration of transformation initiatives and know you still need all hands on deck to fulfill unforeseen business requirements.
3. You’re waiting for your Tier-1 vendor contract renewals and hoping to find ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their solutions without spending too much money – or ideally, even save money in the process.
4. You already experienced a software audit with less than favorable results. To stop the past from repeating itself, you know it’s time to properly manage your software portfolio and software lifecycle.

If at least one of these scenarios feels familiar, you would benefit greatly from evaluating your current software management approach and rapid identification of savings potential. Each one of these situations is influenced by the same desires: a need for cost reduction, cost avoidance, and risk mitigation that results in a better overall investment from your current software in use. All of these benefits can be found through a thorough approach to SLM.

The potential of IT savings through SLM Cost Take-out

Grappling with the challenges outlined above by your lonesome doesn’t create an ideal situation. Remember that your time is valuable too, and the faster you start planning your SLM strategy, the faster you’ll receive savings. For that reason, relying on expert guidance is highly recommended to ensure your initial approach is dead-on before investing more time in cost optimization.

That’s why we developed SLM Cost Take-Out, our rapid, focused, and flexible solution that gives organizations the value they need using the optimal timeframe outlined to us. With thousands of successful SLM projects under our belt and decades of experience, we have the deep knowledge required to help our customers reach their goals.

We help our cost-conscious customers through a three-step process that starts with diagnostics, then grows into choosing your ideal path for software savings, which leads the way to us helping you realize your cost reduction strategy. Let’s examine each phase individually.

Begin with Diagnostics

Before you begin your cost savings journey, it’s essential to know where you stand. However, with many software assets hiding out-of-sight in the typical organization, it helps to receive some outside assistance. When you begin SLM Cost Take-Out, the team at SoftwareOne will interview stakeholders, collect data about your procurement, contract terms, software consumption, software use, administrative expenses, governance details, and more. Thanks to our proprietary diagnostic platform and inventory data analyzer, this incredibly thorough process takes only a few days.

Once we’ve finished our diagnostic analysis and understand your SLM environment inside-out, we are ready move onto the next step.

Identify your savings opportunities

Once we’ve analyzed and established areas of improvement in your current SLM strategy, it’s time to look for areas where you can save. We’ll look across all corners of your organization for sources of savings, but we tend to find them in the following areas:

• Procurement – We’ll help you right-size purchasing volume, understand complex contract terms, determine usage rights, and impart valuable negotiation techniques to help you gain the upper hand during discussions with software vendors and publishers.
• Demand – IT teams can get pulled in a lot of directions by the other departments in their organization. We’ll help you make sure your team is only purchasing what they need and what they’ll use, and provide tips to manage demand going forward.
• Application Rationalization and Modernization – Your organization may find it difficult to identify and avoid the use of software with overlapping functionalities, which disrupts your ability to keep a lean portfolio. We’ll show you the steps you need to take to leverage volume discounts and optimize your operational costs by replacing out-of-date technologies at the same time.
• SLM Operational Efforts – We’ll help your team design and enforce clear policies and procedures that will reduce operational waste. This will improve your SLM processes long-term.
• Cloud (IaaS/PaaS) – Does your organization have trouble controlling cloud resource use? We’ll help you get a firm grip on your cloud spending by helping you utilize fit-for-the-purpose cloud resources, right-size cloud resources, ensure cost transparency, and more.

This assessment should take no longer than a day, although your team should spend as much time as needed to select the best path forward out of all your saving opportunities. Once you’ve determined the areas you’d like to focus on, we’ll start planning an actionable strategy to help you realize the full extent of your savings goals.

Start your journey

The final phase of the SLM Cost Take-Out service, “execution,” relates to how we’ll help you take action after we agree upon initiatives. This phase can be as brief as a few months or stretch to be a multi-year process depending on your requirements and priorities. During this phase, we’ll define and track the detailed steps you need to take, while helping you delegate responsibilities and find the ideal KPIs for your chosen savings initiative.

Through each of these phases, we aim to provide customers with speed, flexibility, and variability as we identify quick wins and rapid cost reduction. However, it’s worth restating that every organization will have a unique path to cost optimization which can drastically influence your savings. Although we’ve helped businesses save anywhere from 30 to 70 percent on their software investments, your true savings will depend on factors like your technological maturity level and your chosen focus areas for cost optimization. Nevertheless, we feel confident saying you’ll save up to 15 percent once this process is said and done.