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We are at serious risk of losing visibility to assets and how they exit the company.
We can already quantify the savings of SaaS automatic harvesting. The risk is minimal since licenses can be reassigned if necessary. We want the 90-95% savings now assuming 5-10% may request the license(s) back in the future.
1) Not only will we ensure environmental compliance and represent ourselves and good corporate citizens, but the project enables us to quantify our sustainability contributions to our shareholders.
2) We have already demonstrated a $X value by recovering SaaS licenses we know were never used; we estimate $X savings by expanding this to a rolling X day harvesting cycle.
1) It is critical we standardize and align all asset disposal activities in the organization, regardless of region, to a minimum set of requirements to ensure compliance.
2) We must mature our SaaS software harvesting process to automatically recover SaaS licenses that have not been used or accessed in XX days to avoid unnecessary software acquisitions.
Have you engaged in vendor consolidation?
This has not occurred on the asset disposal side. We are in the process of RFPing this activity and attempting to consolidate to maximize our visibility in this area.
What percentage of software assets are acquired through a centralized request process?
While much of it is centralized, when acquisitions happen outside the central process we are not able to accurately track renewals or when it should be retired (disposed of).
Interestingly we are not as focused on installed/perpetual software metering tools. I think we will likely increase our focus on the top x% of spend that sits with these.
We already have metering tools for many concurrent user licenses and we have expanded into SaaS metering.
1) Disposal record requirements process. We cannot continue to receive a wide variety of disposal records that do not give us enough information to accurately update our asset records. Additionally, we need to know that assets were disposed and not simply sitting on a shelf or not accounted for.
2) Software harvesting process (specific to SaaS). Thankfully an approved project but we need to add automatic harvesting to SaaS licenses that have not been used in XX months.
We need full visibility to our assets now so we can take appropriate action prior to the end of our fiscal Q4.
Addressed in the value proposition. Risk reduction (as well as supporting our goals communicated to shareholders).
Second, cost avoidance having better visibility to all assets regardless of their stage in the lifecycle.
1) There is a known compliance risk to the organization without this project and we owe it to ourselves to not only act as good corporate citizens but to align our actions with our global sustainability goals.
2) Moving forward with this project gives much needed visibility to our asset lifecycle and could even help us proactively solve issues of missing assets.
1) Stakeholders not only need to be clearly defined, but clearly trained. That training needs to happen in a local, relevant way. It cannot seem like a mandate from corporate on the other side of the world. The benefits to the organization need to be clear.
2) Hard cost savings needs to be measured. Programs and processes often add work, not reduce it. At best they may change it. However, if a hard cost savings, or even a risk avoidance value, can be captured then the project buy-in has a higher chance of success.
Have you engaged in vendor consolidation?
Yes but there is room for improvement. As a company consisting of several business units, there are still factions that prefer one tool over another. This results in overlap, lost discount opportunities and higher administrative costs to support overlapping tools.What percentage of software assets are acquired through a centralized request process?
If we look at our top spend in the organization, a large majority is centrally ordered. However, what is not centrally ordered may occur with vendors we have negotiated discounts with or may result in new relationships that add to the problem addressed in the first question.One of the few tools we are lacking is on the asset disposal side. We currently receive emailed reports which must be manually entered into our asset repository. Modern vendors have better asset tools which would permit us with exports or even API calls to import the data automatically.
Define legislative and regulatory tracking process
Define legislative and regulatory action plan
Both of these would run as a combined project. We are not in a legislative-intense industry, but I feel that as an ITAM program we do not have visibility to or discuss regulatory requirements enough. Exceptions to this would be broader impacting requirements such as GDPR, UK and even California privacy laws, etc.
The internal legal argument document represents a simple summary of the issue(s) without burdening the law department with technical aspects of the review. That said, I would strongly recommend adding “Confidential – Attorney Client Privileged Work Product” as a watermark or header. It’s very important for teams to have an established process for internally discussing audit issues, risks, and exposure without creating a volume of discoverable materials.
