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.