By adopting the Crawl, Walk, Run approach, organizations can progressively improve their SAM maturity.
Blog - January 2025: How you can grow your SAM Maturity step by step: use the Crawl-Walk-Run strategy to optimize tools, processes, and outcomes in ServiceNow
In part 1 of this series, we highlighted some of the main topics from the Crawl Phase. In this part, we will focus on the Walk Phase. In the next edition we will dive into the Run phase!
Highlights of this blog:
1. Introducing the Walk phase
2. Intake software titles
3. Software discovery
4. Integrations to SaaS products
5. Entitlements for datacenter software products
6. Reclamation Rules for EUC & SaaS software
7. ITAM Health Check
8. Normalization
Walk Phase: Cost savings & avoidance / Mitigate risk
In the Walk phase you will begin establishing processes, procedures, policies, resources, and tools to execute on the roadmap of the Software Asset Management program. You can automate the manual processes and procedures, which you’ve established during the Crawl stage. You can now also move to more complex licensing models found in datacenter environments, Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) use cases, and additional SaaS publishers. You can consider additional governance and cost control through software metering and reclamation, identify overlapping software, and right-size the software estate through compliance results.
Process: Intake new software titles into the organization
It is crucial to establish a clear process to intake new software titles into the organization. This process should include architecture, security, procurement and contract reviews. As well as identification of the license metrics, contract terms & conditions, installation requirements, type of software (subscription or software install), and establishing the product owner.
Steps to complete:
Walk Phase: Cost savings & avoidance / Mitigate risk
In the Walk phase you will begin establishing processes, procedures, policies, resources, and tools to execute on the roadmap of the Software Asset Management program. You can automate the manual processes and procedures, which you’ve established during the Crawl stage. You can now also move to more complex licensing models found in datacenter environments, Bring-your-own-license (BYOL) use cases, and additional SaaS publishers. You can consider additional governance and cost control through software metering and reclamation, identify overlapping software, and right-size the software estate through compliance results.
Process: Intake new software titles into the organization
It is crucial to establish a clear process to intake new software titles into the organization. This process should include architecture, security, procurement and contract reviews. As well as identification of the license metrics, contract terms & conditions, installation requirements, type of software (subscription or software install), and establishing the product owner.
Steps to complete:
Discover Datacenter/Infrastructure environments
Whereas the Crawl phase focused on discovering software in the End User Compute (EUC) estate, in the Walk phase we turn our attention to software deployed in the datacenter. Software discovery in datacenters requires more sophisticated tools and processes to account for virtualization, dynamic environments, and complex licensing.
Both ServiceNow and Noventiq recommend enabling ServiceNow Discovery to automatically populate the datacenters. With ServiceNow Discovery, you can use patterns, create them or customize them. Its base system already contains a wide range of patterns that cover most industry standard network devices and applications. Such as these, used by Software Asset Management:
You can also customize other patterns for Software Asset Management.
Additionally, ServiceNow SAM also provides specific capabilities to gather datacenter software information required for specific software publishers:
Steps to complete:
Setup Direct integrations to SaaS products
In the Crawl phase, a broad understanding of SaaS usage was the objective. Now we focus on optimizing the spend on your most-used, highest-cost SaaS applications. To achieve this, you need to create direct integration profiles to view software usage information and optimize stale licenses. The SaaS integration profile pulls your company's software usage information from the software vendor. This information includes a list of all users and identifies which users haven't recently used the software.
Here you can find a current list of all the pre-built SaaS Integration profiles. ServiceNow realizes new integrations on a quarterly basis! It is also possible to create integrations for Adobe Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. For more information, see Microsoft 365 integration and Software Asset Management publisher pack for Adobe.
After following this process, you're all set for reclaiming unused licenses to reduce software costs for your company.
Steps to complete:
EUC/SaaS: Compliance Validation
To ensure that the compliance validation is accurate, it is crucial to ensure that a process is established to check reconciliation output, and identify and fix any data related issues. The Reconciliation and compliance checks are critical to the SAM Program to minimize true-up and audit costs, as well as help reduce waste and overspending on software.
Steps to complete:
Create/import entitlements for Datacenter software products
In the Crawl phase, we focused on creating entitlement data for end-user compute (EUC) software. In the ‘Walk’ phase we expand this scope to include datacenter software. The complexity of datacenter software licenses vs. end-user compute (EUC) software licenses varies greatly due to differences in usage environments, scope, scalability, and compliance requirements. Here is a breakdown of the differences:
In summary, datacenter software licenses are more complex due to scalability, varied licensing models, and infrastructure integration. They often involve server-based or virtualized environments and require careful compliance tracking. The complexity of datacenter licensing stems from its need to support mission-critical systems, while EUC software focuses more on accessibility and ease of management.
Steps to complete:
Important note: The task of creating an accurate baseline of datacenter software entitlements should not be underestimated. ServiceNow recommends working with a certified SAM partner having specialist knowledge in this area to ensure success in this endeavor. The Noventiq team has both the licensing knowledge as well as the ServiceNow expertise to assist you, and the capabilities to perform health checks to assess your current implementation and usage of ServiceNow SAM.
Create Reclamation Rules for EUC & SaaS software
Software Asset Management (SAM) reclamation rules are automated processes used to identify and reclaim unused or underutilized software licenses within an organization. These rules help optimize software license usage and reduce costs by ensuring that unused licenses are reclaimed and made available for other users or purposes.
How Reclamation Rules work:
Overall, SAM reclamation rules help organizations control software spending, maintain license compliance, and ensure efficient resource usage.
Steps to complete:
ITAM Health Check
Now is a good time to run a Health Check for Software Asset Management. The health check gives you a reliable overview of your Software Asset Management configurations and makes recommendations for you to correct any errors that may exist.
Noventiq combines experience with industry best practices to perform functional and technical health checks, to ensure ITAM readiness on the ServiceNow platform. These health checks can also be performed on existing implementations to report (and act) on potential improvements.
During the health checks Noventiq will focus on all the important elements related to ITAM. Such as the basic setup and configuration, overall CMDB health, integrations and Foundation Data.
Datacenter: Normalization
The normalization process in the Crawl phase was described with a focus on end-user-compute. The focus of this maturity step (Walk phase) is around data center software products.
Steps to complete: