Step 3: Race. The Path to Getting the Most Out of Your SAM Program in ServiceNow

Establish and utilize mature, standardized, and automated processes for centralized software asset tracking and systems management. Utilize standard catalog and onboarding processes for new catalog items in the purchasing process. Deliver software to end users through automated, on-demand mechanisms and adjust your software spend efficiently. You should also regularly evaluate processes and establish goals for Software Asset Management (SAM).

Process: Integration of the Procurement process with the Request process
Integrating the software ordering process with the procurement process is important to ensure efficiency, cost control, and compliance. By aligning these processes:

Requests can be quickly evaluated and approved, reducing delays and ensuring users get the software they need in a timely manner.
Procurement can track and manage software licenses more effectively, avoiding over-purchasing, consolidating orders, and taking advantage of volume discounts.
Centralizing the process ensures adherence to licensing agreements, budget constraints, and organizational policies, reducing the risk of shadow IT.
Integration helps maintain accurate software inventories, preventing the use of unlicensed or outdated software and ensuring proper tracking for renewals or audits.

Relevant Demo and Tutorial Content:

Watch here to learn about software requirements via purchase orders;
Watch here to learn about software requirements via inventory;

Process: Incorporate software processes into user onboarding and offboarding

Establishing a process for onboarding or offboarding users is essential to ensuring a consistent and smooth experience, as well as ensuring that a standard process is followed. This includes incorporating asset management processes such as installing software and recording allocations, or removing those allocations and releasing licenses when a user leaves the organization.

Steps to be completed:

Identify any existing onboarding and offboarding processes within the organization. Often, these processes can be enhanced to include asset management processes;
Leverage ServiceNow's HAM and SAM capabilities to automate onboarding or offboarding activities and predefined or custom tasks;
Document the process and communicate with stakeholders.

Process: Create and document the software audit process

Establishing a software audit process helps organizations reduce chaos and mitigate the risks associated with an audit. Identify notifications, stakeholders involved, and other rules of engagement that may be necessary to successfully respond to an audit request.

Steps to be completed:

Consult stakeholders and other internal/external resources when creating the audit process.
Define the stakeholders, associated tasks, system of record and communication plan that will be involved.
Review the process and results after each audit to identify areas for improvement.
Document and establish a review cycle for the process.

Datacenter: Compliance Validation

The Compliance Validation maturity item was described in the “Walk” phase with a focus on the end user. The focus of this maturity item in the “Run” phase is on data center software products.

Steps to be completed:

Validate reconciliation results in ServiceNow Software Workspace.
Identify and correct any data-related issues. The ITAM Health Check Store Application can be used to identify missing or misconfigured data, which can result in incorrect compliance results.
Establish a communication plan to notify stakeholders about results and/or issues that need attention.
This maturity item aims to establish a validation process. Compliance activities for individual publishers/products will occur iteratively.

Identification software overlay

ServiceNow SAM has software overlapping capabilities to help you gain visibility into redundant applications across your software portfolio. Use the Overlapping usage view in the Software Asset Workspace to gain insights into functionality-level usage and rationalize your SaaS and Single Sign-On (SSO) applications that were integrated during the Crawl and Walk phases.

The Overlapping Usage view displays reports showing the spending on your applications based on the application category – SaaS or spend detection. You can also view the list of applications grouped by categories based on the primary function of the software application, such as video conferencing, project management, and email marketing.

This application list includes the following details:

Spent;
Use;
Total number of signatures;
Candidates for recovery;