Archive for February, 2010

Introduction

The extent to which computing has become a part of normal life and everyday commerce has seen a change in the way management approaches how they manage the money, the processes and the assets within a business. IT is becoming an important factor in business.

As computing becomes more widely used within a business and takes a more prominent role within the critical processes of that business, it is important to make sure that an appropriate amount of attention is applied to this computing.

Technology have come a long way over the past few years and are now seen as critical elements of any organisation. As such, they receive larger budgets but must also be able to deal with a greater amount of responsibility.

But after you have spent a large amount of money on developing your IT system and seen the circumstances of your business change, how do you make sure that the IT you are using can keep up with demand? Moreover, how can you achieve this without spending a prohibitive amount of money?

This is the function by IT management software and procedures.

Every company and every situation will have different requirements and will offer different challenges. To satisfy these requirements there are a number of different solutions and approaches that can be used to help control the IT infrastructure of your business.

Software Asset Management

SAM ( Software Asset Management) is designed to do exactly what it says on the tin – monitoring and maintaining the deployment and usage of software packages within your business. It is a business process rather than a distinct discipline and is becoming a more critical part of the modern business environment, particularly for businesses operating in the field of IT.

SAM is not simply a program for support staff installing software across a large company network, but can be a critical tool to help improve performance at multiple levels of a organisation. The goals of SAM include controlling of the IT infrastructure within a business, negating legal risks associated with incorrect software license usage and preserving high levels of productivity by making sure software is up to date and fit for its purpose.

The practice of SAM is often viewed as an unnecessary evil due to the abstract nature of what it is designed to deal with, and the financial case for employing a SAM solution is not always obvious until a complete of the software infrastructure of a company has been done. Once existing problems have been highlighted however, the use of software asset management becomes self evident.

Monetary benefits are still the most motivating commercial factor when choosing to operate SAM software within a company. Every business needs to make profit after all and profitability is a very measurable metric. The financial benefits of software asset management do certainly exist however.

An increasingly large percentage of a organisation’s IT budget is spent on software licensing so there is a vital need to invest to correctly handle this spending. As organisations expand and diversify, their software requirements can change radically and equipment and programs can swiftly become out of date. There is no requirement to spend money to maintain the licenses on this outdated software, which is where software asset management really delivers an edge.

SAM is not limited to simply the technology of your company either. As a management cycle it will often involve many of the departments within a organisation, including Finance Human Resources, to ensure that it runs as cost-effectively as possible.

Ironically, IT service companies themselves, such as the service vendor Centennial need equally as much IT management as their clients.

Why follow a SAM Strategy?

Having heard the various benefits of employing a software asset management solution, how do you know that it would be appropriate for your business? Every business is different and has its own separate set of problems and benefits, so any plan you will use needs to be catered to these specific traits.

There are more than simply financial benefits that can be made through the management of licensing and maintenance agreements across an organisations IT system. Productivity can be vastly by ensuring that staff have the newest editions of software available under current licenses held, and communication inside the business is helped when support staff know exactly what is in use on every computer under their control.

Financial Savings

As discussed before, perhaps the most persuading reason to utilise SAM within your company is the potential financial savings that can be made. The profitability of your business is always going to be the bottom line so any plan that can help to improve this profitability by reducing costs is one that should be considered.

The most immediate way that SAM can help to lower costs is by targeting any software running on your corporate network that is no longer needed. The software might not be being used anymore, it may be too outdated to be of use or it may be duplicated on your system. SAM can be used to remove this unnecessary overhead.

By clearing these items of software that are no longer a help to the running of your company you are streamlining a large portion of your IT infrastructure. Paying for unnecessary software licenses and support and maintenance agreements means that more finance can be spent on the vital parts of your IT infrastructure.

Mitigate Risk

A surprising amount of software that is currently used in the corporate environment is either licensed incorrectly or not licensed at all. Having any amount of uncontrolled software on your IT system is ill advised, because when left unchecked it can become very unpredictable.

Unlicensed software programs can be introduced into an uncontrolled IT system in a number of ways. Software may have been bundled when your IT hardware was originally bought although the original software licenses may have expired. Without the correct access policies in place, users may also be able to install their own software onto the system.

The risk of running unlicensed software on your system is clear. When something goes wrong with the hardware or software platform supporting your vital processes, how do you recover the situation? Operating a complicated software system without the proper support can create a metaphorical minefield when it comes to disaster recovery and can critically inhibit your responsiveness to unforeseen events.

To plan and carry out a successful software asset management campaign, making Centennial distributors top of your list of priorities will be a key factor.

Implementing SAM in your Organisation

As previously mentioned, there are many potential advantages to utilising a good software asset management strategy within your organisation, both monetary and otherwise. It is vitally important to consider which elements of SAM you should implement first since certain benefits will be achieved more speedily than others.

The discovery process can be seen as three primary areas that have to be performed to really develop an informative picture of the deployment of software assets within your business.

Inventory

Inventory is the most fundamental stage of the discovery cycle. It is vital that an accurate inventory of software assets within your business is created to help your IT department to maintain baselines regarding your IT network.
Thankfully, this process can now be automated and even the grandest of infrastructures can be searched and analysed in a relatively short period of time. Inventory must be able to identify your IT assets regardless of their geographical location or computing characteristics.

Capture

The next step in the discovery cycle involves the capture of the software license entitlements that manage the software programs identified in the inventory. The capture process should collect entitlements for all of the software that is installed on your network, even if the software is not currently in use.

The factor of human error can be avoided by using automatic tools that are specifically created to build a library of license entitlements. Packages that are currently available are very efficient at gathering accurate data.

Identification & Validation

The next step is to match up your software inventory to the repository of licensing information that were built in the last two stages. Errors may have occurred anywhere from the original paperwork for software to the most recent audits undertaken on your IT system.

One crucial factor in the validation stage is the ability to link the license entitlements on your network to your organisation’s proof of entitlement. This will be vital if any arguments with software vendors arise as a consequence of the discovery process.

After these three steps have been undertaken you will have created an incredibly rich picture of how your IT system is serving software packages to its users. It will be a lot simpler to identify any trouble spots on your system, or areas of software usage that are no longer of any practical benefit to your activites.

You can now start a period of reconciliation upon your network. You can compare the software packages that are actually used on your network against the licensing and support contracts that you are paying for and close any divides between the two. This is when the financial benefits of software asset management start to take effect.

The software distribution in your system may include many hundreds or even thousands of individual instances, and there are any number of restrictions that may be associated with the licensing contracts you have in place. It is therefore a necessity to automate the reconciliation process, using one or more programs to apply intelligent rules to the process.

Staff who have past experience working with any Centennial specialist company might be able to provide an early insight into how SAM can benefit your organisation.

Compliancy and Flexibility with SAM

Many of the fundamental practices of a modern SAM strategy are based upon the principles set out in the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL. This library details a number of principles and best practices that should be followed for successful control of IT functions.

This library is a changing publication and is often updated with new concepts and techniques that cater to the ever changing IT environment of modern business. A good SAM strategy should be flexible enough to follow the guidelines set out in the ITIL whilst matching the changing needs of the business within which it is actively utilised.

The International Standard Organisation (ISO) has created a standard that applies directly to software asset management practices. This standard, ISO 19770-1, is an exceptionally comprehensive set of guidelines that are built to ensure that SAM is used in such a way as to “satisfy corporate governance requirements”.

The ISO standard should certainly be adhered to when planning a SAM strategy for your own company, although the level of detail included within can quickly become a daunting challenge. It is important to remember that no matter what recommendations you follow when planning a software asset management strategy, whatever you decide to employ must help your organisation rather than stifle it. Industry standards cannot simply be copied when it comes to applying them within your company.

Creating a full and comprehensive software asset management strategy for your own organisation might actually never come to fruition. Your plan must be flexible to change and grow as your organisation does, and it should allow for updates to your daily activities, no matter how trivial or underlying they might be. This really is the key to a worthwhile SAM strategy.

Conclusion

It is easy to see that as the scope and importance of IT systems within your organisation grow, so does the requirement for correct and effective monitoring of these systems. Gone are the days when an IT branch was a bonus that would occasionally forward the business. Computer networks are now vital to the modern company.

As with other branches of any company, a number of separate strategies should be considered and utilised in order to ensure the efficient running of daily activities. SAM should not be the only tool used to manage technological resources within your organisation, but rather one of a multitude of complimentary policies used to manage the system as a whole.

So if you feel that your business is really suffering from a lack of planned monitoring and management over its IT network, or that the possible benefits described in this article could manufacture a crucial market advantage over your competitors, then it would be worth investigating how SAM could be employed within your organisation.