Reviewing and amending your SAM process via a third party

Many organizations know the process all too well. When an important project is kicked off, new technology is purchased and teams are put into place. The initial cost savings everyone was looking forward to are recorded and then poof...the idea of measuring your organization’s savings seems to disappear.

Why? Well, it’s not exactly a mystery.

Measuring such benchmarks can become quite challenging when visibility is limited. Nowadays, you need complete visibility into all areas of your software estate at all times to consistently track your success. With the onset of cloud migration, varying amounts of different assets are used on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. And while the whole point of a mature software asset management (SAM) program is to get your organization to a place where you’re proactively managing your estate, the cloud has made this task feel more complex than ever.

That’s why it is so important to be able to review and amend your SAM process with ease, so everyone involved can overcome common business challenges and enjoy the benefits of strong SAM. Let’s take a closer look at how you can get started via a third party.

Traditional is becoming a thing of the past

Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) is the combination of digitized procurement and SAM. The end goal of SLM is to maximize the value of your software and cloud portfolios. Before you can achieve strong SLM, however, you have to ensure your SAM strategy is running like a well-oiled machine.

These days, the largest issues organizations face when it comes to SAM include:

• A Lack of Visibility Across the Estate - Software estates no longer include only the traditional on-premise environments that ruled for years. Now, organizations are migrating to the cloud or testing the waters with hybrid environments. And when you’re tying in SAM suppliers, tools, and partners, it can be especially difficult to know what is happening across your estate.
• Resource Gaps - IT departments around the world are experiencing a skills gap due to not enough people trained or specializing in certain areas and skill sets such as SAM. This has impacted IT departments and their respective organizations in several different ways. SAM relies on strong people, processes and technology to be successful. When there aren’t enough people to get the job done, the processes and technology put in place simply won’t run the way they’re intended.
• High Costs & Budget - An inefficient SAM program can result in some seriously high costs. If an organization does not have someone specifically responsible for optimizing subscriptions, licenses, and maintenance costs, spend can rack up. Plus, the executive suite may have a difficult time understanding why money is being spent with little to no results, which can create a stressful scenario for getting a budget approved.

Since traditional annual contract reviews are quickly disappearing from the landscape due to the acceleration of the cloud, organizations must have well-written processes that manage cost and governance in place. The stakes are increasingly high, and more and more internal audit teams are being brought in to review these gaps and resolve the resulting issues. If done well, an organization can control IT spend and the associated governance risks. If done poorly, the consequences are dramatic and nearly instant. For example, the costs associated with Shadow IT in the cloud can easily begin to set back your organization on a monthly basis.

Where reviewing & amending comes into play

Organizations around the world have dealt with the business challenges that come with an inefficient SAM program such as high costs, a lack of leadership support, disconnected processes, and not enough clear visual data. This is where the importance of reviewing and amending SAM processes comes into play.

Reviewing your software estate allows you to assess and benchmark your SAM Maturity so you can best understand where your strengths and weaknesses are. It will provide you with insight into whether you’re in the chaotic, reactive, proactive, service, or value level of maturity. And once you know where you fall on the SAM maturity ladder, you can make the right adjustments to get you to the next level.

Beyond SAM maturity, third-party reviews completed in collaboration provide several different benefits to the organization, such as: reduced costs, saved time and effort, faster buy-in, lower risk, and more. Third-party reviews are important to ensure internal teams can always gain access to an independent score, which means they can then return to the C-Suite with their findings and justify spend.

How SoftwareOne can support your strategy

Here at SoftwareOne, we have automated the review and ongoing management process. We know how valuable it is to have access to a fully-automated, real-time assessment of your entire software estate from an ITAM perspective. That’s why we created The Diagnostic Platform: our set of assessment-based services that bring meaningful and actionable insights. The Diagnostic Platform allows organizations to benchmark, collaborate, and track progress across the software estate based on over 10,000 consulting hours.

We recognize the importance of reviewing your estate and as a result, we invested in the purchase of SAMSentry, now called SLM Diagnostics. SLM Diagnostics from SoftwareOne provides a 360-degree view of your entire software estate from procurement to retirement, addressing common customer challenges around SLM in real-time.

The process begins with 400 weighted questions. Once answered, our experts provide different roles within your organization via a detailed review. This way, customers can immediately see their current position and how they can align and compare with SLM best practices. Plus, your organization can better understand your strengths and weaknesses within your SLM strategy as a whole. From there the system will automatically track updates and maturity levels. SLM Diagnostics can also benchmark results against an average customer, providing you with a truly thorough breakdown of your current situation.

Every organization desires clear visibility across its entire software estate and SLM Diagnostics provides all of that and more. Through this solution, you can expect increased business productivity and efficiency, cost optimization, and even reduced risk. Providing top stakeholders with access to a real-time SLM assessment to can bring your business goals to reality more quickly. Once the initial assessment is complete, the process becomes automated over time, which means you can review and implement changes to your SLM strategy faster.