Software Asset Management Program for Australian Government
- Industry Government
- Capability ICT Asset Management
- Customer Australian Government
Our client is a major Australian Government Department with a wide operation that plays a key role in serving the Commonwealth of Australia.
Opportunity
As with most large organisations, investments in skills and tools are focused on everyday operational procedures, and for high level strategic programs of work that contribute to the traditional view of efficiency and growth.
For our client, with a large and complex ICT environment, the required focus on the everyday meant it didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to managing its large and growing software portfolio.
With such significant software licence holdings and annual expenditure, our client was concerned with its lack of visibility into how its software was deployed, and whether its commercial arrangements and vendor relationships were providing value for money or had room to improve.
Drilling deeper into the client’s environment, several issues were identified such as:
- Suboptimal software deployment meant the organisation was paying for more licenses than required to achieve the desired outcome.
- Ongoing licensing support costs were being incurred for licenses that were not in use.
Additionally, a general lack of awareness around how software was licensed across the business areas was putting the client at risk of non-compliant software deployments which can cost many tens of millions of dollars if penalised and create reputational risk.
Armed with this new insight and understanding, our client saw the opportunity to implement an end-to-end Software Asset Management (SAM) service to procure and manage its commercial software estate.
Solution
With clear objectives around cost and risk reduction, the agreed deliverables for the new SAM service were to:
- Produce cost reductions and efficiencies.
- Identify, manage, and mitigate commercial and business risks relating to SAM.
- Further improve software asset management practices to ensure the efficient delivery of software to its own staff and strengthen vendor relationships and investment value.
As an experienced IT provider with a history of providing cost reduction services such as ICT Asset Management and instilling better practices for future improvements, our team delivered:
- A cost savings program focused on generating significant year on year savings.
- Improved software asset management practices to strengthen vendor relationships and investment value.
- KPIs to measure the Services’ effectiveness.
- Annual SAM Maturity assessments and roadmaps to continuous improvement.
- A rolling compliance program prioritising those products and vendors posing the highest risk to the organisation.
- A SAM technology roadmap aligned with architectural direction.
- Licensing optimisation advice to projects prior to purchasing software and ensuring optimal use of licences.
- More efficient processes and governance.
Outcomes
Following the implementation of the new SAM Service, our client was able to identify savings and cost avoidance of more than $200M and has significantly increased its visibility of software deployments and usage to reduce the risks of software non-compliance.
Additionally, the Service has enabled our client to negotiate flexible and innovative commercial arrangements aimed to optimise current and future spend with software vendors, and has enabled significant improvements in business interaction (end user experience) through:
- Effective user communications.
- Reduction in software queue numbers and request times.
- Implementation of performance management and reporting.
With efficient processes, programs and governance in place, our client has been able to rapidly adopt cloud computing technology across large portions of its environment, with our team engaged to lead the adoption, management, licensing optimisation and cost governance strategies within the cloud environment.
Further, with the modernisation of our client’s software discovery toolset, our client has increased its software discovery and management capability, enabling it to dramatically increase the speed and efficiency of software compliance auditing and allow for real time software reclamation and reallocation. This has increased the optimisation of license usage, and ability to forecast software license shortfalls and optimise the procurement and provisioning processes. Transforming procurement from a reactive and often rushed process into a proactive activity that adds value to our clients’ operations.
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