The obvious answer to if someone has an ITAM Program, assuming they are doing ITAM work, would be, “Yes, I do!” How else would they be doing ITAM work without an ITAM program in the first place? Many organizations will have ITAM professionals, but may lack the umbrella, over-arching function, of an ITAM program manager. In recent online sessions where ITAM professionals were polled, less than half even had an ITAM Program Manager. This may come as a surprise for some, but the reality is, many programs are evolving. Day-to-day fires can demand our attention away from strategy and cross-functional coordination.

So do you have an ITAM Program? Is there a Program Manager? What other artifacts, or pieces of evidence, could we look for to determine if an organization honestly has an ITAM program. These are some of the key questions we can ask to determine if we, or another organization, has an ITAM program:
• Is there an official ITAM program?
• Are there executive sponsor(s) of the program and its related activities/projects
• Is there an ITAM Program Manager to facilitate stakeholders and Key Process Areas related to ITAM?
• Is there a centralized repository?
• Is there a discovery tool?

This list is neither comprehensive nor a small task to be able to say, “Yes” to each. The first question also happens to be the contextless answer to our overall question of if we have an ITAM program. It doesn’t tell the full story. Sure we can have a document, or policy, formally acknowledging the existence of ITAM, but what if we don’t actually act on it in a meaningful way? If we do not have an official ITAM Program, then we don’t have a program. If we do have an official ITAM program, then we need to look just a little closer to make sure it is not just in name only.

Does the ITAM Program have executive sponsors? We may have some directors or maybe even VP’s that are committed to the cause. We could call them champions. Do we also have the support of the C-suite? Do we have the support of executives even in other geographic locations? The reality is, when we try to do big things at our companies, we are nearly doomed to fail without the authority, credibility, and resources that can come with having the support of top-level decision makers. Eventually we will need a siloed team to play nice, or we will need significant resources to respond to an audit or improve our maturity. That is honestly kind of hard to do if we have to do volunteer bake sales to scrounge up a few coins to barely make a dent against the needs of our programs.

Even if we have a program and executive sponsons, at the most basic level, if someone is not writing all this down, does it really exist? Conversations and presentations about the art of what is possible, and musings on where we could go, could be just that. Thoughts floating around. Without a program manager to bring it together, we may find that we are spending more time postulating and blaming, then turning our realities into a game plan. Without a person to be the right-hand of ITAM progress, it becomes a hope that we will make progress.

Our first three; Is there an official program, does it have executive sponsors, and is their a program manager, go a long way towards demonstrating that an ITAM program does in fact exist. An extremely fast following thing we would expect to see for a legitimate program would be some level of automation, specifically, a discovery tool and centralized repository.

Both a discovery tool and a centralized repository enable automation. While this is true, it is not telling the full story. These tools are not simply taking manual tasks and making them easier. They are quite often unlocking capabilities that would be all but impossible to do in spreadsheets or word docs. Discovery tools can look at usage in ways that would be impossible or unreasonable to do without a tool. They can interrogate systems and enabled options for our software that would be nearly impossible to do manually. A centralized repository will provide auditable history and controls that are needed to meet regulatory requirements. It would be difficult to call a bakery a bakery, without an oven, even if they have a fancy logo and sponsors. The same can be true for an ITAM Program.

An honorable mention of something to check on would be policies. Do ITAM specific policies exist? If so, that can be an indicator that we just might have a legit program. Policies are required to have a healthy program, but it is also an area many programs struggle with. If a business has an unhealthy policy culture, then the challenge is even harder for ITAM policy. A program can exist without policies, but I would be suspicious of if it was just vapor. Much like automation, policies existing is a fast follower of having a legitimate program, sponsors, and a program manager.

Many organizations may have an ITAM Program in name only. This is how many legitimate programs start. Take a look at where your organization is today. Dig a little deeper on the artifacts and evidence that we would expect to see if we have a fully functioning ITAM program. Use what you find in your prioritization of projects and next steps. If your answer to any of the questions earlier was, “No.” Then that can go pretty high up on your organization’s priority list.