Introduction
Setting up your Software Asset Management (SAM) team with the right people and skills can be the most important decisions you make to influence your future software costs. What skills should be on a SAM team? Where do you find those people? Where should they report? How many people are required and what should their responsibilities be? These are all questions explored in this section.
A SAM team is normally a cross-functional team. The skills required come from different parts of the organization. Therefore, typically they do not all report to the same manager in the organization structure. In terms of level within the organization, a SHARE survey on this question discovered that in 72% of organizations, the software asset managers are at the same job level as the hardware asset managers.
Software Asset Management is not just a mainframe responsibility, although for many companies, it starts there. This same SHARE survey showed that 95% of SAM teams have responsibility for the mainframe software. Interestingly, almost half of those teams also have responsibility for UNIX and desktop/PC software too.
Skills for a SAM team
So what skills are required for a good SAM team? Briefly, they are vendor management, technical perspectives, financial analysis, capacity planning, product migration and legal skills.
Vendor management skills are typically found in the purchasing or procurement departments. Knowing how to deal with vendors in a fair and even manner, developing and evaluating RFPs, and negotiation expertise are some of the key skills that fall in this area.
Balancing a potential "commodity" viewpoint from purchasing are those on the team with technical skills on the specific hardware platform(s). These folks should have a solid grounding in support, maintenance and migration areas of software asset management. These people are likely already in your IT group.
Financial analysis skills are becoming a more important part of SAM. Some of today's contracts contain complex financial provisions such as leasing and future financial commitments that need to be carefully understood. People with these skills can be found anywhere there are folks with strong math backgrounds, but are usually in accounting and finance departments.
Capacity planning is something of a technical skill. The reason it is broken out separately is that it already exists in more shops today. The issue here is one of reporting structure. Capacity planning used to be part of the hardware asset management function. Given that software a far larger part of the TCO pie than hardware, it now makes sense to have this function report to the SAM group. Their focus needs to change to long range budget-level accuracy, not shorter term detailed configuration issues.
A migration team should be part of any well run SAM team. It is almost a sub-team. They are not part of the everyday negotiations and strategies. Rather, their job is to continually execute a series of product migrations away from vendors that have treated you poorly and onto vendors who have a long term track record of treating you well. See "Migration Alternatives" in the navigation bar above-left for more information.
Finally, don't forget to get some legal skills on your team. Specifically, you are looking for software intellectual property contracting experience, or a willingness to develop some! The legal folks need to be involved early in the negotiations. Their job is to make sure the contract accurately describes the business issues decided during negotiations. If they don't understand the business issues and what you are trying to accomplish, their ability to help is limited. See "Terms and Conditions" in the navigation bar above-left for an outlines of those business issues.
Start small, but start
A combination of these skills may be found in one person. Thus the actual number of people on the SAM team will vary. Also, the discipline is not mature. Over time the number of people involved in SAM will grow as its importance to the company's bottom line grows.
In 2001, 37% of the companies in the SHARE survey referenced above had no SAM team at all. But 17% had 10 or more people on their SAM team. The rest were somewhere between 1 and 10 people. What's the right number for you? There is no general answer. But starting with a couple of folks and growing as required might be a good approach.