When Is the Right Time to Invest in a ITAM Tool?

Purchasing a ITAM tool is a substantial investment for any organization. Anglepoint’s experts often see clients who have made these purchases with the dream this alone solves bigger programmatic issues. The reality is a highly capable IT asset management tool does not provide a solution without the right strategy, people and processes.

Understanding the Impact of a ITAM Tool

A tool is typically a key component to unlocking real-time ITAM when you invest in a ITAM tool. Whether you need an IT Asset Management (ITAM) tool now depends on your organization’s needs, goals, resources, and budget. Some factors should be considered to ensure you are ready to invest, namely what you want that tool to deliver.

Organizations with large and complex IT environments looking for real-time dynamic decision-making based on clean consolidated and centralized data will need a strategy to help manage software licenses, ensure compliance, and optimize software usage.

Moreover, organizations with tactical requirements sometimes utilize tools that offer a point-in-time solution. These requirements include the likes of point in time compliance position reporting based on specific software publishers, data sources, governance and compliance, device management, and deployment. Some of the tools that provide this tactical data and solutions may already be in place and, with minor adjustments, will provide some level of software asset management.

Ultimately, the decision depends on your organization’s size, complexity, and specific needs based on use cases from departmental stakeholders.

When embarking on a journey to evaluate your organization’s SAM/ITAM tooling requirements you will need to involve people from multiple departments. The cross-departmental communication will ensure a full picture is built around what tooling is already in place, what information is available, and what outcomes are required. This will drive requirement creation for when and why ITAM tooling should be considered as an investment.

What ITAM Tooling Do You Have?

Your IT team will provide visibility of existing tooling and know if they have sufficient skills on their team to utilize them effectively or carry out any required integrations or modifications. The procurement team will provide information on purchase orders and contracts for the existing tools which will be important when ensuring you are using up-to-date versions or entitled to utilize them. Your security team will add an extra layer of scrutiny to check the tools are secure through a test and review of deployed agents and connectors.

The inventory & system management tools (both paid & free) that provide point-in-time data include the likes of:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is a tool developed by Microsoft for the deployment and management of software or hardware across an organization.
• Microsoft Intune,a cloud-based service focused on mobile device management and mobile application management.
• Jamf similarly, was designed to manage and secure devices such as Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs.
• The IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) was developed by IBM an as FOC tool to enable businesses to measure and monitor their IBM software usage.
• Oracle License Management Services (LMS) helps organizations optimize and manage their Oracle software licenses.
• RVTools is a utility for VMware environments which allows customers to plan, deploy and manage workloads, which was acquired by Dell Technologies.
• Active Directory (AD) was developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is a directory service and provides authentication and authorization to network resources.
• Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (SPM) includes functionality for inventory management of both software and hardware along with network monitoring.
• Configuration Management Databases (CMDB) is a centralized repository used to store information about the configuration of IT assets and their relationships.
  
• Contextual data sources typically when data is extracted we need to know other information such as which billing center this sits in, which project its associated to, end of life, or if it adheres to corporate governance requirements. These will typically be sourced from non-ITAM systems and the data may need to be transformed to give stakeholder value reporting.

Evaluating these tools and understanding the data each provides is the first step to a complete view of your IT estate. The data can be combined offering a view of your IT estate that these tools cover. Further gap analysis will be required to ensure you have total coverage of your IT estate. Ultimately, this evaluation will need to be undertaken as any investment when you invest in a ITAM tool that will require integration with these tools as data sources.

Are You Meeting Your Organization’s Objectives?

Organizations with tactical requirements relating to specific publisher audits or contract renewals will undoubtedly have needs met with point-in-time data. The request may be – “We need end of life data on the whole estate to satisfy our regulators!” or “We are being audited by Oracle and need deployment and entitlement data!” These outcomes can be realized using the data provided by one or more of the above-mentioned tools. The data will be sufficient for them to create baselines and explore areas where they can reduce risk or avoid spend, ultimately delivering on the tactical goals.

Organizations that have implemented an ITAM Framework and defined their North Star Metrics, to measure business outcomes, will have stakeholders with different requirements to deliver results. Each stakeholder will have their challenges, and ITAM tooling must meet these use cases with a solution, and information that can be acted upon effectively. These requirements will be more complex and need real-time data coupled with forecasting capabilities.

As your organization moves into this deeper level of complexity, the comments in the above image will most certainly resonate. The information your tool will need to provide must be repeatable, sustainable, and measurable to deliver the intelligence that will drive ongoing effective IT Asset Management. A manual process of data collection and manipulation will no longer be enough, data will be out of date by the time it gets into the hands of the stakeholder.

The requests will be more strategic, “We want to be compliant with our key software publishers following a number of acquisitions.”, “We need to reduce software spend by 20%”, “We have organizational targets to reduce our carbon foot print by x%”, or “We need to justify the use of Public Cloud, is our footprint of applications growing into Saas?” These strategic requests will require historical, current, and forecasted information displayed on a dashboard that gives a single-pane view of this combined data.

In the end, this level of IT Asset Management reporting can only be delivered through ITAM tooling. And the ITAM tooling will only provide this level of reporting when installed correctly, integrated completely, and managed properly with the correct modules. You will also need to consider carefully, what platforms and data you need, and the underlying data points required. For example, a CISO estate visibility requirement will drive very different toolsets to a procurement lead’s optimization of SaaS shadow credit card spending.

Make Sure the ITAM Tool Will Solve The Problem

The decision to invest in a ITAM tool will be based on which of the two narratives applies to your business. If the decision is made to invest in a ITAM tool, it is vital to include requirements from all stakeholders and to outline problems they need to solve, before speaking to the tool vendor. These use cases must drive the decision, not the tool vendor demo and the extras they offer. Hold the software tool vendor to account for these use cases.

Including all relevant departments in the evaluation of your tooling requirements makes for a cohesive and internally aligned SAM initiative.

How Can Anglepoint Help?

Anglepoint’s Technology Service offers a unique one-stop shop for tooling requirements. Whether you are assessing current tools, trying to drive value from tooling investments, or implementing and standing up a tool, we can support you every step of the way. If you would like to discuss your tooling strategies with our experts, contact us here.