SAM is a team effort
Piaras MacDonnell - 2:41 pm - December 7, 2011
For most organizations these days the question is not “will we ever need a Software Asset Management (SAM) project”, but more commonly, “when will our SAM project kick off”. Whatever the reason – vendor audit, data centre move or technology refresh – SAM is becoming an invaluable fact of life.
Many tasks go into delivering a successful SAM project, but they should not be left solely to the SAM Project Team. Others in the organization are also critical in having useful input to the project.
So who else should be involved in a SAM project and what might they contribute?
Procurement & Legal
This is the primary source for entitlement records. These teams will have records of all purchases and more importantly the contract details. This is particularly useful when there are no electronic records, complex ULAs or older and non-standard contracts.
Accounts
This team will have records of the annual support that is being paid. These could provide clues on entitlement and what is still valid. They will also have details of the support paid per vendor and this simple fact can be quite valuable in establishing the priority for what should be audited. In addition, the Accounts team will also be able to drive license consolidation and SAM process improvement by having the details of all license purchases. All of this information will be important, but it may not be pretty!
Department Heads
The managers of the various divisions will be able to tell you what systems they use, what might interface to them and the total number of employees. They should also be able to tell you how many are using a particular application or system at any one time and how critical that is to them operationally. This will assist in establishing a concurrent user metric, a measure of multiplexing and where double counting might be occurring.
IT Services & Service Desk
These teams should be able to assist in telling you what the IT estate is by providing details of numbers of servers, cores, virtual and physical servers, etc. Where change management and a CMDB is maintained they should also have deployment details. This information will give you an indication of actual usage. If the people supporting users of the IT estate do not know what is being used, you are unlikely to find it anywhere else in your organization.
There are likely to be other teams who can help in a SAM project – IT security, capacity management, outsourcers and even vendors. The important thing is to get assistance from all stakeholders to ensure your project findings are based on the most comprehensive set of information available.
