North American bank achieves big savings with new visibility into IT assets

Seeking a better ServiceNow foundation

With several thousand employees across the country, the bank uses a wide array of applications, with many thousands of licences with different software publishers, contract terms and end-user licensing agreements. With no centralised system for managing these assets, it had no way of knowing whether it was overpaying for software or complying with contracts, putting it at risk of audits and steep fines from software publishers. The aim of the collaboration with SoftwareOne was to improve practices in the areas of contract management, software asset management (SAM), hardware asset management (HAM), configuration management database (CMDB) and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (Microsoft SCCM).

Assessing the bank’s ITSM maturity

SoftwareOne began by conducting a thorough assessment of the bank’s ServiceNow platform to understand its level of information technology service management (ITSM) maturity. The assessment, which took about eight weeks to complete, sought to understand the bank’s current systems in light of its future goals, using that to identify areas for improvement.

With the findings from that assessment in hand, SoftwareOne then organised a series of requirements and integrations workshops with key stakeholders across the organisation. These helped to further refine understanding of current SAM processes and pain points, as well as the technical and functional steps that would be needed to achieve the bank’s goals. SoftwareOne used the insights from these workshops to create a roadmap for implementation.

After the roadmap was approved, SoftwareOne began working with the bank to help it implement the recommendations. One of the first steps focused on discovery of software and hardware assets across the business, using that information to auto-populate the ServiceNow CMDB. Building a solid CMDB foundation would then make it possible to improve the bank’s other application practices and ServiceNow tools. At the same time, SoftwareOne also worked to develop the internal resources the bank needed to use ServiceNow effectively. This included extensive training of people who would be using and managing the ServiceNow platform.

SoftwareOne then guided the bank on implementing the recommended improvements to SAM and HAM processes and contract management. This included assisting with the resolution of issues identified with ServiceNow’s SAM Publisher Pack for Microsoft – the most significant of which was the identification of major compliance issues during the discovery phase. Other issues identified during this phase included an oversubscription for Atlassian Confluence – where the bank was not using more than 60% of the licences it had paid for – and hundreds of software products that had reached the end of support, end of extended support or end of life.

SoftwareOne's recommendations included:

• ServiceNow SAM Publisher Pack for Microsoft: Review to adjust installations and clustered environment to comply with licensing requirements and reduce true-up cost risks.
• Atlassian Confluence: Create rules to automatically reclaim unused subscriptions after 60–90 days and consider a true-down at next renewal.
• End-of-support/end-of-life products: Automate monitoring for products approaching end of support, end of extended support and end of life, with cyber review to determine decommissioning or sustainment strategies for each.