Over those January Blues?

It may be a little late to think about New Year’s resolutions now as we enter February.  But now we’ve got past blue Monday – the third Monday of January and supposedly the most depressing day of the year – still with lots of resolve and energy, we thought we’d share some SAM resolutions that will see you through the year ahead.

They’re not too difficult to keep. In fact, they’ll make your job easier and lead to ensuring the organization doesn’t have any gaping license liabilities.

Here at Snow we believe that being successful in SAM isn’t about working in isolation but working with other parts of the organization; you’ll find that the benefit is symbiotic and will lead to better results all round.

In fact you might even find that the board will praise you for your actions, whether in avoiding hefty penalties from software vendors, from the money you save in re-harvesting software or from optimizing the number of licenses across the network. Whether it’s January 1, February 2 or March 3, it doesn’t matter when you start but start you should…

Talk to other stakeholders in your organization

to identify synergies between their field and SAM to leverage your SAM investment. The obvious areas are ITSM, information security, finance, procurement and legal. For the business to really succeed with a SAM initiative, these stakeholders will use and enrich SAM information to help the daily running of the business. Giving them access to one central repository with data useful for a number of different stakeholders provides a number of significant gains enabling them to be more productive and track what they and you need to know to improve business processes (it also lightens the load on SAM professionals as they deal with less requests for reports!).

Tailor information for these different roles

…, at the most generic level, SAM is all about making sure that you gather all the right license consumption data, at the right time and that it’s seen by the right people to be able to make informed decisions. So ensure that the different stakeholders can view the information particularly relevant to them (and filter out what’s not) to enable them to be truly effective.

See what benefits these synergies can bring to you.

It’s important to get a holistic view of what software is being consumed by whom across the business including an understanding of those who are no longer using the software. As Cloud services and SaaS have become more prevalent, the tracking of consumption by end users has become more diverse – gone are the days that users only work on one device – so tracking consumption from many different sources has become inevitable, for example being able to track usage of software on smartphones and tablets.

Where SAM really plays its part is by adding intelligence such as entitlement and legal information and automate the reporting to calculate the licensing position so that the number of licenses can be optimized to the level of need. Stop reading now, and put that meeting request in your colleague’s calendar today – the first step in deriving better value from your SAM program.

And contact us if you want further ideas on embedding SAM into the business.