Just the Facts: How Using an IT Service Catalog Makes Software Asset Management Easier

While IT asset management always starts with an accurate inventory of hardware and software, it certainly doesn’t end there. To understand how your IT assets are impacting your business, it’s essential to correlate them against the related financial assets, such as software licenses, service agreements, or lease contracts. Creating and publishing an IT service catalog is the next step to successful asset management and offers several benefits, for software asset management (SAM) in particular, including:

Streamlined Software Acquisition and Seamless Delivery

Deploying an IT service catalog automates the entire software purchase request and acquisition process. After you pre-select approved software applications and publish them to the catalog, users can easily access, then instantly create and send their requests. This increases efficiency and assures software compliance.

Depending on the type of software request being made, you can define a delivery workflow and manage it from start-to-finish – all through the IT service catalog. You can, for example, set various levels of specific managerial approval for certain software and check online to verify the software registry and confirm how many licenses are available.

If a license is available, it’s assigned to the requester and the registry is updated. If no license is available, the task gets assigned to a procurement agent, who subsequently purchases the additional license. Then, the software is deployed on the user’s PC.

Easier Access to SaaS Services

By using an IT service catalog, you can completely and conveniently centralize the delivery and management of both traditional and SaaS-delivered software applications. A catalog item could be “Access to Dropbox.com” or “Access to Trello.com” available only to Management or Marketing staff members, for example. Users could automatically request and receive their unique userID’s and temporary passwords for access to these types of external portals.

Smoother Staff Transitions

A workforce is often fluid – new hires come on board while some employees transfer, retire, or are “downsized”. On-boarding and off-boarding employees can be streamlined with an IT service catalog. You can detail all the necessary steps that have to be taken for each transition event or scenario. Hiring managers or HR reps can order services again once a position is (re)filled and then easily configure the software stack assigned to each new employee.

The most efficient IT organizations today know the true value of effective software asset management. With comprehensive SAM strategies supported by technologies such as an IT service catalog, companies can fine-tune their software asset management processes to improve utilization and maximize the value of their IT assets and investments.