Software Asset Management for effective Digital Transformation

Software Asset Management is critically important for effective Digital Transformation endeavours. Unused, unnecessary, incorrectly installed, duplicated software and ineffectively negotiated software license agreements consume vast amounts of budget that should be used for innovation and change management activities.

Here are some questions for you to consider.

1. Have an Effective License Position (ELP) been developed for focus on high risk software, within your estate and are all issues being tracked?
2. When was your last license verification/audit with any of your Software Vendors? How many of these were 3^rd party lead?
3. How problematic are your database environments? In our experience, this is one of the biggest areas of non-compliance, especially in virtualised environments as capacity is added.
4. Country of usage is usually specified on purchase of license, ensure that any sharing of licenses between countries has written agreement from the Software Vendor.
5. All Terms and Conditions should be clear in contracts, ideally one should not allow the vendor to insert links to Software licence Terms and Conditions in contracts, as these terms and conditions may be updated by the vendor without prior notice or with notice in an innocuous email message.
6. Unsupported or licensed software configurations may lead to license breaches – running licensed software in a way not supported by the license – eg. OS version, HW, virtualisation technologies and configurations (e.g. CPU virtualisation rules)
7. How do you deal with software bundling For example database purchased and licensed as part of a third-party application such as RPA, ERP or HR.
8. Differentiation between production and non-production environments.

Benefits include:

1. Material savings on software budgets
2. Reduced software license compliance risk and formalised vendor audit protocols and process.
3. Optimised usage of software in the estate i.e. reduced shelf-ware.
4. Reduced technology complexity.
5. Improved vendor negotiation leverage realised through carefully orchestrated engagement approaches and heightened organisational knowledge of the software estate.
6. Improved management and greater visibility of software contracts and licenses.