ITAM and the return to the workplace

[Bryan Blackburn]

In these troubled and turbulent times, IT Asset Management (ITAM) has an important role to play in how businesses and organizations continue forward, and how they can best make use of IT and its many moving parts.

Setting the Stage for the ‘Big Return’

No matter how long it takes to establish a “next normal,” the world is going back to work in an ever more determined fashion. Part of that “normal” is an increased emphasis on work-from-home (WFH). But the emerging reality is not just WFH, it’s really “work from anywhere.”

As the stage for work moves from “work from home” to “work from anywhere,” companies need to look for more opportunities for collaboration and innovation, and ways to spot and bring in new talent. At the same time, C-level execs are learning how to match cash-flow forecasts to current realities, focusing on how to keep workers engaged and positive, and dealing with supply chain worries.

The “next normal” for the workplace is bound to involve more technical innovation. Biometric technology should help ease identification and authentication concerns, while translation tools should help linguistically diverse teams communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Indeed, collaboration (regardless of location) means that teams will shift boundaries to include people by skills, knowledge, and mindsets. Workers will come to expect that they can do anything and everything—onboarding, training, management, meetings, product or content creation, and more—in a remote and distributed setting. Properly executed, this opens the doors to a more diverse, distributed, resilient, and capable workforce.

ITAM is an important ingredient in this new, diverse, and distributed mix. It can keep track of who’s using what software, clouds, or hardware devices and make sure that individual contributors keep current on key software components such as meeting and communication tools, collaborative content and product creation tools, and more. ITAM can also help ensure that distributed teams don’t fall prey to threats and vulnerabilities and that organizations keep track of (and pay for) commercial licenses or subscriptions that their scattered workforce uses.

What Knowing Assets and Exposures Brings to the Party

Tracking assets tells you what your workers are using, and what they need to get their jobs done. Exposures—i.e., vulnerabilities—show your operations teams what software elements they must patch, update, or replace with a more secure or capable alternative. You need to know what software is running on what hardware to identify what might be exposed. ITAM also helps tie up all the loose ends to make sure that your organization secures what it uses.

Benefits of Effective IT Asset Management

ITAM can also be a huge help in clearing up your IT roadmap, consolidating across multiple versions of workplace tools. This helps simplify support because it reduces your organization’s technology footprint, and lets users safely assume that they’re using the same tools and platforms for collaboration. Furthermore, ITAM helps organizations master compliance requirements for consolidating volume licensing agreements and meeting licensing terms.

The upshot of a more effective asset management regime is lower direct asset management costs. This means fewer contracts to negotiate, fewer catalog items to maintain and support, and improved IT productivity. Over the long haul, ITAM helps make sure that organizations put their IT assets (and funding to cover related costs) to best use.

What Community Health Systems Learned from ITAM

Community Health Systems (CHS) is a Tennessee-based, Fortune 500 hospital leasing and operation company. CHS supports more than 17,000 patient beds and offers a broad mix of diagnostic, medical, and surgical services for inpatient and outpatient populations.

CHS’ existing environment was one in which individual hospitals oversaw their own software acquisition and management (and which resulted in many contracts with the same vendor or provider). Periodic audits were monstrously complex and time-consuming, could require time from five to 10 staff members, and cost six figures to complete.

CHS turned to ServiceNow to get a grip on its software investments and trim licensing fees and complexity. CHS started by implementing IT Service Management (ITSM) and using ServiceNow’s Software Asset Management (SAM) tool to manage its software assets. The ServiceNow tools helped CHS control CapEx and OpEx for its hardware and software assets.

Now, CHS is able to match licensing fees to actual software use and can tie purchases directly to deployed licenses (which it had been unable to do in its earlier, distributed, and uncoordinated systems).

SAM’s automatic discovery was able to track 95% of CHS’ software assets across the organization. It also documented complete software inventory and the purchasing paths through which software had been acquired.

This helped CHS establish firm control over its software assets. This has led to the elimination of double- or multiple-counting for assets and helped CHS realize a 40% reduction in licensing costs as a direct outcome of compiling an accurate, timely inventory. It has also led to more useful vendor negotiations, pushbacks on audits, and shortened the audit cycle by a massive 10 months per audit.

ITAM Aids the Process of Continuous Discovery

In the modern, distributed, and dispersed workplace, software is always coming and going. Yesterday’s news doesn’t explain or help with today’s problems, particularly where software assets are concerned. By providing a current, accurate inventory with status for individual items, ITAM helps organizations stay on top of changes, both planned and unplanned.

ITAM also helps organizations keep up with cloud usage for reserved and on-demand resources so that organizations can factor constant and demand-based costs for cloud services and subscriptions.

To that end, ServiceNow’s Licensing Workbench helps companies optimize and stage their current licenses to best benefit, with what-if planning tools to help IT and operations staff plan for growth or introduction of new tools and platforms.

Don’t Wait Anymore

If you’d like to learn more about how ITAM can help your organization service and support today’s distributed, dispersed “work from anywhere” workplace, the free eBook The Gorilla Guide to Optimizing ITAM and SAM for Success provides a roadmap for doing ITAM right. Also, check out ServiceNow’s ITAM homepage or view the ITAM animated demo.

Author: Ed Tittel