The first step to SAM Maturity

Businesses have many journeys to take these days. Chief among them, of course, is digital transformation. As legacy organizations struggle to meet the challenges of transforming themselves to meet 21st-century digital demands, some are discovering there’s an unintended consequence: Complete loss of control over Software Asset Management (SAM)

The case for detailed diagnostics

Losing sight of your software estate takes place slowly and over time. A typical trigger is when procurement of assets moves away from a centralized model. No longer relying on the IT department of yesteryear, departments and individuals take the initiative to add new software capabilities themselves.

The result is that digital capabilities evolve not just at the enterprise level but also at departmental and individual levels.

Meanwhile, however, the tools and capability for managing that ever-widening body of software assets just aren’t keeping pace. That’s where chaos takes hold. As a result, it becomes nearly impossible for organizations to understand the current state of their SAM programs, much less strive for SAM Maturity.

Cut through the chaos with a Maturity Assessment Tool

The hardest part of reaching SAM Maturity is getting started. How do you move from “chaos” to running a fully optimized Software Asset Management program? Like the fabled 'journey of a thousand miles', it starts with a single step.

While every organization’s journey is different, they all have the same starting point: Assessment.

Do you know which areas are your weakest? Do you feel prepared when there’s a compliance assessment looming on the horizon? Are there undiscovered opportunities for reclaiming and reusing software?

Our ’s SAM Maturity Assessment Tool provides answers in all of these areas. It gives you an aggregate view of how your organization is doing managing its software assets. It’s also the first step in the Diagnostic phase of your journey toward SAM Maturity. But what else is involved? What can detailed diagnostics do for you?

Get a grip on your current SAM strengths and weaknesses

It’s not possible to build an effective blueprint for SAM Maturity without first knowing where you stand. When conducting an assessment, be sure to choose one that offers the following insight:

• Provide you with a complete picture of where you fall along the spectrum between chaos and control of your software assets
• Sets a clear benchmark to be used as a starting point for designing your SAM roadmap across each stage of the software asset lifecycle, from catalog to procurement to retirement.  No two roadmaps are exactly the same.
• Enable a big-picture view of your current state of affairs so you understand where you need to go for critical dimensions like skills, governance, technology, process and many others.
• Empower you to drive and sell your vision internally with a clear business case and strategy for moving to a future state.

After this assessment, you will have you a top-level understanding of the path your organization must take to SAM Maturity – and can then begin to drill down into specific steps. We assist in building these in-depth plans with our SAM Diagnostic Services, including a visual dashboard of maturity, insight into industry standards, project tracking, and real-time recommendations.

This in-depth plan begins with the maturity assessment, and extends to achieving real-time audit defense, gaining executive buy-in, and remediating underperforming areas of software management.

Bring business requirements into the picture with a tool evaluation

Leaders who don’t have clarity about their existing tools and functions have a hard time achieving alignment between business requirements and IT spend. As a result, it can be nearly impossible to make SAM improvements. Tool evaluations can not only give a clear picture of existing tools and functions, but they can also provide valuable insights into feasibility and business requirements. For example, what are your specific Citrix requirements? How does the existing set of tools support IBM and sub-capacity reporting requirements?

Start demanding ROI from your SAM program

Finally, no diagnostic process would be complete without a good look at an organization’s current state of ROI in SAM.

Is your current SAM program saving you money or just using up resources to stay one step ahead of auditing emergencies? Are you overspending on software? Do you have a cost take out (CTO) strategy? How about security patches and software updates— are you keeping up so you don’t experience a costly and damaging network breach?

A mature SAM program can bring you increased ROI along several lines of improvement:

1. Ensuring that you aren’t paying for licenses that nobody is using
2. Lowering costs by identifying unused software
3. Lowering costs by removing software assets that are duplicated across different departments within your organization
4. Optimizing recurring spend
5. Repurposing unused software
6. Closing up security gaps to avoid costly breaches
7. Reclaiming and reusing business software licenses
8. Preparing you for audits

Look forward to the next step in the journey

Getting a clear picture of your software estate is only the beginning of your journey. Achieving full-tilt SAM Maturity is a long-term process and therefore that journey can take longer than you expect. In some cases, it can be a multi-year journey involving a lot more than meets the eye. That’s because it takes time to develop the kind of business intelligence you need to enable good Software Licensing Management (SLM) and SAM decision-making.

But if you’ve got a clear picture of where you stand, you’re well on your way.

Assessing your current position along the sliding scale of SAM Maturity is your first step. A complete SAM transformation will involve a total of six steps. Luckily, speeding up that first step is possible with our SAM Diagnostic Services.

And once you’ve achieved a detailed current state assessment, you’re ready for phase two. That’s where we begin creating a custom strategy to get your organization on the road to advanced SAM Maturity. In this next phase, you’ll receive a detailed project plan for your target state, whether it’s basic or advanced Software Licensing Management (SLM) or SAM.

Build your blueprint for SAM Maturity

Gaining control over your software assets is a key component of digital transformation. Even if your organization is stuck in the early phases of transformation, or not moving forward at all, your cadre of software assets is probably growing — possibly in a state of under-management. Instead of an advanced, mature SAM program, you’ve got chaos brewing, making it impossible to know where to start.