Get praise from your CTO by selecting the right software asset management tools

Posted by AmandaTom on June 25th, 2015

Be it Software-as-a-Service or Software on Premise, every employee of every organisation now interacts with some type of software to do his or her day-to-day work. Having optimum number of software licences for all the users (based on their role, department and location) is vital for smooth business continuity. Imagine if 1% of your product development team cannot use that all geeky engineering software or if there are ongoing issues with your world renowned email software…. It affects productivity. It is often not obvious but software’s have become integral part of businesses, so it is no surprise that decisions on software asset management tools are taken in CTO’s offices. Just to let you know, Software asset management tools is also closely used with the term IT Service Management (ITSM)

There are two main goals of software asset management tools;

1) To ensure manual processes of managing all tasks related to Software and IT Asset management is almost fully automated

2) Drive business decisions by analysing data that comes out of your software management tools. (Like it or not, this aspect of your software asset management tools is equally or more important than the first one…)

Typically, one of the most important reasons that businesses buy software asset management tools is for asset discovery. i.e. To exactly know how many software’s does a business have and who are the users (this is a simple task for a small business but for anybody who has more than 100 employees, this is time consuming and also ongoing task).

Once you know how many software’s you have, the next step is optimisation. Typically most businesses are over entitled. i.e. they have more number of licences than required. At this stage, Contract and License Management features kick in, i.e. you know when the software contracts are up for renewal and what version of software licences you have.

From here on, it is typically plain sailing because your software asset management tools have all the essential data for continuous optimisation of your assets.

Software configuration based on user roles and locations as well as releasing new versions of the software can also be highly effective with IT Service Management.

The other key area of automation is dealing with user requests, i.e. new software requests, troubleshooting, bug fixes… The key element here is to make it easier for the users to record their request. Most software asset management tools provide excellent features in this area.

So in effect, your IT Service Management Tool knows how many softwares you have, who is using them, how they are using it and what issues they have with their usage. With this data, you can analyse reports like software usage by department, software utilisation rate, software help-desk success/failure rate, the favourite one is total optimisation rate. All of this information can help you take informed business decisions on ongoing basis.

Software asset management tools come in different shapes and sizes, find the right software by comparing IT Service Management Tools