New Year or Groundhog Day?
Victoria Barber
Technology Guardian providing strategic insights to business stakeholders and customers | Podcast Host - We Got Your Mac | Innovation | Tech Evangelist | Mentor | Speaker | Aspiring Futurist | Ex-Gartner Analyst
As part of a current project I've been reviewing all my ITAM career, from the first Mac and font licensing project with Ashley Scammell and my time as a practitioner, through my years as a Gartner analyst and my current work at Snow. It's an appropriate activity at this time of year, when many of us review what we've done and put our goals and plans in place for the coming year.
When I review my research, I can see some clear progression from tactical material documenting processes and best practices, through metrics and measurements to governance and more strategic material looking at the drivers behind ITAM culminating in some of the more recent material looking at how ITAM needs to change to fit into the new digital-first world we now inhabit.
However, when trawling through my tweets and LinkedIn posts searching for a specific piece of information I saw a different pattern, and was slightly depressed as I commented to a friend that what I'd learned during my day's work was that I've spend the last 10 years repeating the the same old thing. For example, attendee and marketing quotes from presentations in 2015 included things along the lines of 'What is an IT asset?' and 'What can ITAM contribute to digital business?', themes that I'm still exploring (see here for my latest view on what a technology asset is, and here for more on my view of ITAM's role the world of digital business) and planning to publish more research on soon.
After trying (and to be honest failing) to rise above the 'But isn't that what analysts do best?' response to my observation that I seem to have been constantly repeating the same old stuff (in case you're reading, yes, I'm still sulking) I started looking at the evidence more closely. I wanted to know what had stayed the same (and why) and what's different. While I've got more work to do on this analysis here are my initial conclusions:
What's stayed the same:
- There is still limited executive buy in for ITAM (both within IT and across the broader organisation)
- ITAM is still largely an admin function concerned with discovering and cataloguing hardware and software on the network
- Underinvestment in resources whether technology, people, process development or communication
- Poor governance and integration with IT and business activities
Why it's stayed the same:
- Too little focus on business need and and the potential business impact of ITAM activity
- Too much navel-gazing and an ITAM-centric view of the world
- Too little focus on the contracts, licence agreements and support contracts that make up the entitlement that forms the 'asset' part of the 'software asset'.
- Too much focus on technology as the magic solution and not enough on the need for skilled people and effective technology to make use of the technology
What has changed:
The world around us
- Cloud, SaaS & IaaS have enabled mobility
- Which in turn has increased the number and variety of devices we use on a daily basis
- Technology lifecycles are faster, both hardware and software are cheaper and easier to access, software licences or services require ongoing subscriptions rather than one off payment
- 'Digital business' signals true integration of IT into business rather than being an enhancement or optional service, and the death of 'Shadow IT'
This is, of course, a gross over-simplification and generalisation. Many of the clients I've worked with over the years have matured and adapted their ITAM functions to develop capabilities that generate true business value and are integral to their organisation's success. But on the whole, ITAM hasn't changed, and the world has. If executives failed to see ITAM's relevance in the age of 'traditional' IT-centric IT, then it's going to take some big changes on the part of ITAM managers and practitioners to convince business stakeholders that they can add value.
ITAM Subject Matter Expert, IAITAM Fellow, Board Trustee/ITAM Forum, CSAM, CHAMP, CSM, ASM, CTPS
5 年Coincidentally, I have also reflected recently on my 30+ years in ITAM (practitioner, educator, evangelist, consultant), with similar conclusions. I am particularly concerned that the focus of ITAM seems to be regressing, from business (fiscal) management to basic IT asset tracking.? While a necessary foundational practice, and essential in mitigating (cyber) security and other risks, IT asset tracking is insufficient to realize ITAM’s full potential, resulting in missed opportunity for many organizations.
Project Management | SAFe | IT Process Improvement | License Management | SAM
5 年Thank you for an interesting long-term perspective on why instantiating ITAM and SAM processes remains such a sisyphean task and why SAM/ITAM functions so often fail to evolve into strategic units that provide true value-adding services to the business. I would add one more bullet to "What has changed" - risks arising from mobile computing and virtualization technologies that have become so pervasive, and cloud/SaaS/IaaS models that have rapidly become the preferred way to distribute software and provide services. For example, understanding how Software Assurance benefits change when and how often organizations are permitted to take certain actions with Microsoft products in virtualized server environments (whether on premises or in the cloud). Another example is the failure (by accident or design) of publishers to update licenses to fully reflect the increasingly complex environment - subscriptions are readily added, but historical use restrictions often remain and publishers may only recognize that a small subset of virtualization technologies have acceptable mechanisms that limit the need to license all products on every processor regardless of how broadly they are actually used in practice. I conjecture that most of the issues arise from the first bullet under "What's stayed the same" - that a failure to excite and engage the strong interest and sponsorship of executives has resulted in a tendency to automate and to staff SAM and ITAM functions with experts highly focused on the detail to the detriment of realizing significant strategic outcomes. Thank you for an interesting article.
B2B Technology Marketing Leader & Chief Storyteller at SHI International
5 年I'm sorry that you're still sulking(!), but I think you're right in that the basic premises of SAM / ITAM have not changed too much in recent years.? They are still intended to help the organization run efficiently, to minimize risks and optimize costs.? The differences come mostly from the changing software delivery models (from on-prem to cloud and now hybrid cloud) and the increasing diversity of the stakeholders involved in selecting, buying and consuming 'IT assets'.? I know it's not a popular view, but I still feel that part of the problem - and hence a cause of the Groundhog Day effect - is IT's insistence on persevering with terms like ITAM and SAM, which earned negative perceptions among the C-Suite that they may never shrug off.? Maybe for it not to be Groundhog Day we have to not call it Groundhog Day??
Global Client Executive at Gartner
5 年Some of the recent conversations that I've had around ITAM and SAM in particular seem to indicate that there has been significant traction in it becoming a true C-level initiative.? Especially around the research your referenced around Shadow IT, which implies a significant disconnect in the enterprise.? Are you seeing the same traction around elevating this ITAM conversation to the C-Suite, or have any suggestions on how we'd collectively act to encourage that traction??
Helping sellers hit their quota since 1995.
5 年One of the biggest challenges I see unchanged is that ITAM/SAM prorgrams don't have a consistent home. In some orgs, they're part of IT Opps. Others it's a governance task. Others still have it as a procurement function. And far too commonly, it's spread across two or more departments.?