Governmental Sub-Agency Navigates the Road to SAM Maturity with SAM Managed Service
Company Profile
Developing a mature software asset management program is not easy. It takes years of work. This Department of Defense sub-agency is a long-term Anglepoint client dedicated to that goal.
After running one of our Strategy Development Workshops in 2019, they engaged Anglepoint in 2023 for a refresh workshop to review and benchmark maturity and seek solutions to some of the internal roadblocks they’d faced in their journey over the last four years.
With Anglepoint’s help they assessed the current state of their SAM program and practices (spend, inventory and strategy), identified priorities to focus on for the next year, discussed critical risks and goals, and established a Plan on a Page (roadmap) for execution. The results of the refresh workshop provided insights into new observations and key recommendations. A clear stakeholder-need-driven strategy with defined processes and policies was outlined to add greater business value and bottom-line savings.
Transforming internal culture for a long-term SAM strategy
As a government entity in the United States, this client faces unique challenges when it comes to organizational culture and change. One of the greatest of these is a tendency to focus on reactive tactical approaches rather than more long-term strategic initiatives.
While they had made huge strides since their last workshop with Anglepoint in 2019, the SAM landscape had changed and internally they had struggled to implement the governance element of their software asset management program that had been recommended. While there were good SAM fundamentals in place in the central team, they were not organization-wide. They had put some new policies in place, but they weren’t always followed and ITAM council meetings were poorly attended.
With a software asset management team that is still fairly new to the ITAM space, this organization originally came to Anglepoint in order to leverage their license expertise. In this refresh workshop, the focus was cultural and strategic. How could they work together to identify the roadblocks within the SAM function, create even simpler processes and policies, and encourage active participation?
Active participation from stakeholders and new, streamlined processes
Anglepoint produced a report with the complete pain points of their ITAM program and created a plan with a timeline to work towards greater maturity. This included creating two process documents – one for Software Process Renewal and one for IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) Process that included a model of new process flows, a written description of new processes, the benefits and risks of implementation, and an updated roles/responsibilities (RACI) relating specifically to the process. They also created a policy document that contained specific policies related to hardware and a single KPI document for hardware with 10 hardware KPIs in one place.
Anglepoint also added coverage analysis in the 2023 workshop.
Recommendations included:
• Leveraging executive support to expand ITAM reach
• Ensuring impacted stakeholders are actively participating
• Right-sizing IT Asset Management critical tasks
• Establishing a trustworthy HAM baseline
• Positioning ITAM as an enabler of strategy and value-add
Strategic priorities included:
• CMDB troubleshooting and dashboarding for more trustworthy data
• Increasing value extraction from their SAM P tool
• Helping realize tooling value through ServiceNow training and Tier 2 entitlement onboarding
A roadmap to SAM maturity
The result of this process was the creation of a clear plan and timeline to SAM maturity for the organization, which would include the following elements:
• Centralized IT only allowing deployment of approved software
• Has >68-95% of their assets in inventory
• Reconciles their inventory sources quarterly
• Signs off quarterly on software asset management reports
• Operations manages associated rather than separate asset inventories
As a government entity in the United States, this client faces unique challenges when it comes to organizational culture and change. One of the greatest of these is a tendency to focus on reactive tactical approaches rather than more long-term strategic initiatives.
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