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ITAM OUTSOURCING

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Resources required for effective IT Asset Management are getting harder to find, while business needs are dynamically changing and market trends don’t make it any easier (shifting to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS). Smart Cost take care of your ITAM operations, we can perform day-to-day tasks, while you can fully focus on other business-critical activities.


We will start by guiding you through processes to enable ITAM Outsourcing – to specify scope (ranging from specified software publishers to your entire license portfolio), targets and balance responsibilities. You can choose from three ready-made models (Basic, Advanced or Complete ITAM) or we can develop tailor-made procedures to gather data from you and provide back desired outputs. We will regularly review the service to tune-up for maximum efficiency. Enjoy your full comfort to have best-in-class services with minimum effort.

EXECUTION PLAN

  1. Define overall ITAM scope both on operations and governance levels (responsibilities of internal ITAM team/function).

  2. Select ITAM activities to be outsourced and success criteria including SLA. We will use our standardized SmartOut model to effectively pick optimal set of tasks and services. By default, we provide 3 package levels (SmartOut Mini, Balanced and Full).

  3. Design and implement procedures to ensure proper communication and data exchange in both ways (e.g. software discovery provided by the customer and license position calculation by SmartCost).

  4. Set up access rights and meet technical prerequisites to connect to customer’s systems and repositories. As independent consulting company, we in SmartCost Consulting are not providing or selling any SAM solutions.

  5. Quarterly meeting to review the service quality and SLAs, adjust cooperation model while aiming for effective and top-quality service

ASK YOURSELVES...

  • What ITAM skills and services do you want to keep in house and what expertise is expected from your external specialists?

  • Are you preparing your company for acquisition or divestiture and you need to have control over your IT assets with full flexibility to adapt for upcoming change?

  • How many ITAM personnel should you have to achieve your business targets?

  • Can you afford to have a commitment to keep expensive ITAM specialists in-house?

BUSINESS CASE STUDY

Customer was planning to establish an IT Asset Management function responsible for software and hardware procurement, to control costs and to avoid audit risks. However, it has been a new role and it was not fully clear what tasks and responsibilities should be assigned and what resources and tools would be needed to ensure efficiency.

During initial meetings with IT stakeholders we defined ITAM goals and clarified set of responsibilities (split into governance and operations) to be provided by the ITAM function. We agreed to dedicate half FTE in-house mostly for strategy and process adoption, while operations and process design was supposed to be outsourced by Smart Cost Consulting.

For each outsourced responsibility we set up inputs, outputs and SLA, while full outsourced scope was limited by 5 man-days per month to perform following activities:

  • Maintain hardware and software inventory and quarterly reconciliate against discovery data.

  • Perform standard procurement process for IT assets from getting quote, processing PO requisition, sending approved PO document and invoice validation and accounting.

  • Participate on new contract negotiation for key software vendors.

  • Perform annual license review for selected software vendors, including proposal of possible solutions to remediate potential license gap.

  • Review change requests from license perspective and calculate hardware and software 3-year TCO for new projects and initiatives.

  • Establish monthly reporting through PowerBI including software purchases & renewals, forecast tracking, planned future purchases and revealed under- and over-licensing during license reviews.

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WHAT IS NEEDED FROM YOU?

  • Introduction discussion with the CIO and IT stakeholders.

  • Split in-house and outsourced responsibilities.

  • Review model of inputs, outputs and SLAs for outsourced activities.

  • Quarterly meetings to review service quality and adjust responsibilities.

  • Bilateral NDA

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