How to make the most out of your software asset management tools

Posted by tedmark on June 26th, 2015

The fundamentals of most businesses change every 18 to 24 months. For example; if we look at the IT Industry, Software has moved from being on-premise product to software as a service in just under 5 years. Most businesses don’t enhance/edit their IT Infrastructure in order to address their changing business environment. Your software asset management tools are one of the major enablers of your business, here is a quick straightforward guide to make the most out of your software asset management and keep it fine-tuned with your business changes.

Once every 2 quarters or 6 months a good practice is to cleanse data from your software asset management tools - obsolete assets, locations, users etc should be archived or hidden. It is worth noting that obsolete data should not be deleted as you will lose data for reporting purposes. For example; show asset utilisation by department report – if you delete users and assets then you will not have the right data.

Your software asset management tools have truly insightful data that could be shared with not only stakeholders of your business but also in most cases with your customers. For example; your stakeholders will be very interested to know how your asset management tools have helped the company’s profitability. So reports like license optimisation, entitlement reductions and standardisation should be tied back with financial numbers and presented to your stakeholders. (The most important element here is to tie back information to financial numbers). If you are using help-desk or incident logging systems for your customers then you can send a quarterly report to all your customers, providing them with report/list of all the incidents (with status details). This will really help you to justify support costs and your service.

You could try and hold at least one internal meeting every six months to evaluate and monitor performance of your software asset management tools. Areas like user adoption, changes required in user interface, reporting capabilities are all iterative processes. If you continuously fine tune them, then your return from your software asset management will continue to grow but more importantly your software will be continuously relevant for your business.

One area that most businesses don’t do is holding product enhancement meetings with your asset management software supplier – your supplier can only develop the product with your feedback. If you hold product enhancement meeting once every 6 -9 months then over 2 years you will notice that the product is developed as per your requirements. (because there are very few customers who participate in product development meetings, the ones who do, shape-up their software asset management tools)

By the way if you are looking to make a fresh start on your software asset management then our website is the easiest place to shortlist and compare software asset management tools. They also include software demonstrations and product demos.