Have you ever wondered whether all those things the ‘experts’ tell you to do to achieve effective ITAM actually work? Do you really need to do all of it? Or can we focus on one or two things and we’ll find the rest will follow?
Well, here at ITAM Intelligence we sometimes get called ‘experts’ but the truth is, we wonder about these things too!
So we’ve decided to something about it. The plan is that over the next few years we’ll do bits of survey and interview based research to really try and nail down the things that good ITAM teams do vs the things that not-so-good ITAM teams do. We’ll be posting the results here on the ITAM Intelligence website.
We had a first stab at it in February, with a questionnaire on the software request process, which we promoted under the auspices of our IT Asset Management training school, ITAM Accelerate. We chose this process because we felt that understanding what a ‘good’ process looked like was easy – we asked how close respondents are to providing an Amazon-like service to their end users?! Simples!
We got a good response for an industry survey – 120 respondents – and the results of the survey were revealing.
For instance, we found that having a software shop where end users could select software wasn’t particularly indicative of a good software request process – some of the worst performers had a software shop, and some of the best performers didn’t! What DID make a difference, though, was adding additional information to the request process to help end users make the best software choices – for instance information about price, including whether it was free or chargeable software.
We also found that organisations with a higher performing process were more likely to perform automated license checks, while teams with a poorer performing process were more likely to skip the license check and go straight to the software purchase process to buy the software requested – which is a counter-intuitive finding if you’re basing process-performance on the speed with which you get software to the people who need it.
If you want to check out the full results of the survey, then take a look here.
And if you’d like to be involved in further research (next on the agenda is the vendor software audit defence process) then please provide your contact details here.
