In this modern business world, having software is no longer a luxury—it has become a critical aspect of the success of any company. Regardless of what industry you're in, they all depend on digital software to make things easier and more convenient.
While software proves to be helpful and necessary in your company, it can also become more burdensome and frustrating if not managed properly. As you face numerous software license agreements, more aggressive vendor audits, and increasing budget share for software procurement, software asset management can help keep you sane.
In this article, we're sharing some valuable tips and best practices for implementing a software asset management strategy for your business.
1. Find The Right Tool
The market offers all kinds of software for all aspects of your business, including the management of your software assets. With numerous software asset management tools available today, choosing the right one for your company's needs will take some research.
To determine which tool is suitable for your company, you need to consider the functionality and features you need. These may include:
- License management
- Software discovery
- Scalability and flexibility
- Analytics and reporting
2. Establish A Reliable Team
Choosing the right software management tools to automate the process is just one part of the equation. You also need human expertise to utilize and achieve your software asset management goals.
You can establish a dedicated team or appoint an individual from your IT team to manage your software assets. However, the former tends to be hard on your budget while the latter can increase the burden and responsibility on the appointed individual and prevent solid focus on the task at hand.
In this case, outsourcing a dedicated team of experts is your best option. With an experienced firm like Power Consulting, one of the best providers of managed IT New York has to offer, you can ensure a laser focus and expertise in managing your business software. They can help ensure that you're using the right software licenses as well as provide ongoing tracking of software and app usage to optimize software usage and cost.
Outsourcing your software asset management team can also help you skip tip #1 since most dedicated firms have their own technology to help monitor and manage your software assets. This means you gain access to top-of-the-notch software tools and continuous monitoring of your digital assets.
3. Create Software Categories
Using an intuitive software asset management tool, you can get the complete list of all current tools and software that's currently present on your business's devices. This way, you can discover all current software you're not using or have similar functions.
Once you get a complete list of all software in your company, consider categorizing them by priority:
- You can assign high-priority software, which includes tools with high cost, business impact, or compliance risk.
- In contrast, assign software tools that don't cost anything or supporting tools as low-priority software.
- For software without a license, malware, or duplicates that should be cleared out from usage, you can assign them as Blacklisted.
By categorizing your software, you can gain a better idea of what software tools you already own and whether they’re being utilized efficiently.
4. Do Regular Internal Audits
Modern software asset management solutions can help automate auditing and analytics, providing you with a comprehensive history and compliance report of your software assets.
That said, you shouldn't rely solely on external audits to stay compliant. Regular internal audits should be taken as an extra step to protect you against unwanted audit-related liabilities. It also gives you a deeper insight into your assets and pinpoints potential license redundancies and inactivity areas.
5. Don't Forget Your Assets
One of the most common mistakes businesses make when implementing their software asset management strategy is focusing on managing tools and software assets on physical devices.
However, as more and more business shifts towards the cloud, you also need to consider the non-physical locations such as cloud repositories and virtual environments. If you have software resources deployed on cloud services, then you need to include them in your overall strategy and audits. This way, you can pinpoint possible optimization areas and ensure that your employees have full access and use of them.
Takeaway
As different types of software become available to help all aspects of business, software asset management has never been more important. With proper software asset management, you can efficiently manage all apps and tools your business uses.
When your business is centered around a solid software asset management strategy, you'll have the right processes and tools to make better software decisions that boost your company's overall productivity and lower costs.
Neil Scott is a Content Marketing Manager whose greatest passion includes food, technology and all things outdoors. He also has a background in web development and loves to be among the first to find out about new trends and technologies.
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