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- Integration helps maintain accurate software inventories, preventing the use of unlicensed or outdated software and ensuring proper tracking for renewals or audits.
- Watch here to learn about software requirements via purchase orders;
- Watch here to learn about software requirements via inventory;
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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;
- The Overlapping usage visualization in the Software Asset Workspace can help identify SaaS and SSO rationalization opportunities
- Additional reporting based on discovery models or software models can be done using the data in the product table
- Watch here to learn about Software Spend Detection.
Bring Your Own License (BYOL) License Tracking
Bring Your Own License (BYOL) allows organizations to use their existing software licenses in a cloud or hosted environment, saving them from the need to purchase new licenses from the cloud provider.
Key aspects of BYOL:
- Cost Savings: You avoid the need to purchase new licenses, potentially reducing overall costs.
- License Compliance: You remain responsible for managing and tracking the usage of your licenses to ensure compliance with vendor terms.
- Flexibility: BYOL allows organizations to migrate workloads to the cloud or new environments without the complexity of purchasing different licenses from the cloud provider.
BYOL support in Software Asset Management helps you:
- Automatically discover perpetual and subscription-based software licenses across on-premises and cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and GCP.
- Determine license compliance for the following software products in your hybrid infrastructure: Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Windows Server, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server.
- Provide advanced support for optimization through Cloud Special Rights* such as dual-use rights, editing flexibility, and unlimited virtualization.
- Perform remediation when your software is out of compliance.
Steps to be completed:
- BYOL data imported by a discovery product such as ServiceNow Discovery is required.
- Once the installation is populated and the appropriate BYOL fields are filled in, the reconciliation process will handle any rules specific to the installation product.
- Click here to learn about BYOL capabilities in ServiceNow SAM.
- Click here to read a blog about BYOL support in ServiceNow.
Conclusion
Implementing a SAM program in ServiceNow is a structured journey that improves visibility into software assets, minimizes risk, and increases operational efficiency. By adopting the “Crawling, Walking, and Running” approach, organizations can progressively improve their maturity in SAM .
Translated by 4Matt Technology from the original The Path to Value for a SAM Program in ServiceNow.
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