Gaining investment for ITAM is essential, but delivering business value is equally as crucial. But, how do you deliver business value if you can’t secure investment? Once you have some level of buy-in for ITAM, no matter how small or big, or how mature (or immature) your ITAM practice is, demonstrating ROI is paramount to maintaining and growing your ITAM team and its strategic value.
We recently hosted a ITAM ROI & Reporting webinar with a panel of experts to get their tips on how to best report on ITAM ROI. Joining us were:
- Jonas Jasinskas: Global Service Design Lead, Software Sourcing & Portfolio Management, SoftwareOne
- Juliana Beauvais: Director, Product Marketing for IT and Enterprise Asset Management, ServiceNow
- Russ Eicholtz: ITAM Principal Consultant, SHI International Corp.
ITAM – the nucleus of business information
Jonas explained that ITAM has a “strategic function in the business”. ITAM professionals should, through their reporting, showcase to stakeholders how ITAM is central to business operations.
Russ highlighted that “every business operation relies on IT asset management”. ITAM has a wealth of data that can help multiple departments achieve their goals. It’s finding out about stakeholder needs, sourcing the ITAM data that can help, and sharing that data in a meaningful way. This will help turn ITAM into a “strategic influencer”.
Juliana suggested linking ITAM activities and data to leadership team objectives. “What does the leadership team care about?”. She suggests demonstrating how ITAM contributes to key business outcomes as business “runs on the assets you’re managing, and people can’t do their job without them”.
Low hanging fruit for showcasing valuable
Jonas said organisations should “operationalise” the on-boarding and off-boarding of software and to regularly revisit this practice rather than solely during annual renewals.
Russ pointed out that you need to “understand your business’ objectives” and think about how you can contribute to them.
Juliana suggested you “track your savings” every month. You can then work with your leadership team to see “what was enabled due to money being saved”.
Measuring your ROI
Russ explained that “we have to be good at telling the story as to the value ITAM is driving” so stakeholders recognise it.
Juliana encouraged ITAM practitioners to “get a little creative” by showcasing intangible ROI – highlight industry statics, news articles, and more.
The dos and don’ts of ROI & Reporting
As Russ pointed out, a lot of organisations are still very “reactive” and focused on the compliance piece of ITAM. Now’s the time to get out of that comfort zone and be more proactive, forward-looking and relevant.
Our experts suggested the following ways for ITAM to showcase ROI and to report on results:
- Know you audience. Know who will look at your data. From there, create a structure and present your data accordingly.
- Use visuals. Present details in a compelling way. This may also help you to more easily spot trends and/or risks.
- Understand what you want to measure. Don’t create more work for yourself. What do you really need to measure? What data will help your stakeholders?
- Develop relationships outside the IT organisation. Understand what business leaders across the organisations are trying to achieve. They may also be able to help you.
- Ask and question your reports. Experiment with your reports. Ask for feedback and ideas. Talk to different people.
If you’re an ITAM Forum member, log in to access the on-demand webinar:
On-demand webinar: ROI & Reporting
For more information about ROI & Reporting, see this blog: