The Challenge

The education sector has no shortage of ongoing challenges. From skyrocketing costs and intense competition, to increased government regulation and restricted public funding – it’s more difficult now than ever to deliver education services effectively. The higher education sector is unlike other industries; thus, you must have the ability to deliver increased efficiency and effectiveness across your institution. Fortunately, we can help.

The Solution

We work closely with higher education institutions to help solve your most-pressing challenges: from developing self-service portals that empower students and faculty, to streamlining requests and changing the way people work from reactive to proactive with automation. The bottom line: we give you the expertise you need to deliver your services better, faster and more cost-effectively by leveraging delivering services – anytime, anywhere, anything.

The Challenge

Many companies face the challenge of answering questions related to software purchases, such as, what licenses do you own, where is it deployed, and what does it cost you? A recent audit prompted a large global manufacturing firm to enlist Ness’s help to better understand the cost and tracking abilities of their software and license asset management. The firm acknowledged that the amount of money spent on software purchases was out of control and needed to confidently be able to answer the question, “Where are we today?” to avoid future costly penalties. In order to move forward, they had to enlist Ness’s help to prove that they could self-fund all of their next steps in their business plan. Part of this was helping to diminish their financial cost, and another part was Ness uncovering that they were improperly taxed.

The Solution

Our team of experienced Asset Management experts conducted a thorough assessment of the firm’s governance, processes, practices, tools, and data for IT Shared Service (ITSS). After doing so, we established a baseline of the current state and developed a business case and strategic roadmap to achieve an agreed upon future state for Software Asset Management. The Ness Assessment not only uncovered opportunities to reduce software spend, improve the processes, procedures and technology necessary to standardize and improve the management of software, but it also uncovered opportunities to recover millions of dollars spent on unnecessary software sales tax.

Once Ness was contracted for the assessment, the client-stated objective was to build a business case that could self-fund the necessary improvements that needed to be made to Software Asset Management. Ness succeeded identifying opportunities that not only would self-fund the three-year strategic roadmap to improvements but would also fund the development of an ITAM Office to govern ITAM long term.

The Challenge

A multi-billion-dollar petroleum and natural gas exploration and production company desperately needed a comprehensive solution to eliminate their numerous software asset management shortcomings that included their inability to tie software licenses owned from both new and existing software contracts to what was actually installed on computer devices. Given the organization is global in nature, this meant IT assets were often purchased, implemented, and maintained by different departments in remote and disparate locations. Combine this with constantly changing and evolving IT infrastructure to make for a very difficult task of tracking IT assets and their current status. This mistake was not only costly but opened the organization up to significant risk should they be audited.

The Solution

A key fundamental to starting this project on the right path was to engage the people – engage other business units (outside of IT) early on in the process to determine their true frustrations with requesting services from IT.  Ness began by establishing a governance office to create standards and consistent processes based on best practices for requesting software, purchasing software licenses and managing the client’s global overall software compliance. Ness’s solution included:

• Facilitating automatic creation of software license titles in Asset Management (AM) through integration with a 3rd party tool to provide operational efficiencies.
• Configuring both a straight-line depreciation schedule and annual depreciation report to provide the client with the most up-to-date asset management information.
• Enhancing the client’s use of the IT Asset Management (ITAM) solution Procurement module to better adhere to ITAM best practices.
• Implementing Ness’s own asset candidate process – a proven methodology for reconciling devices from the client’s discovery tools to the ITAM solution resulting in improved asset inventory accuracy.
• Designing and implementing a rogue software management process solution that was supported and managed within the ITAM solution.