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I’ve just spotted a really good article about building the business case for ITAM on the ITAM Review website. It’s actually an interview with Jenny Schuchert of IAITAM.

It really struck a chord as in real life I’m in the process of building just such a business case for ITAM. I recognised many of the ‘gotchas’ she described as having real potential to derail the project.

I’ll be working with a project manager, so I think I’ll suggest she read the article to provide a bit of background and understanding as to what we’ll be trying to achieve. I also think I’ll need to make sure we focus on the following:

Communication

Identifying all our stakeholders and communicating with them at an appropriate level will be absolutely key. Not only do we have to build and sell the business case to the execs, as Jenny mentions, we also need to make sure we sell the business case to everyone who will need to be involved, from the different heads of IT in different operating units down to the administrators who actually purchase licenses and machines and the IT support guys who install hardware and software.

Think outside IT

I think it’s important to not just build a business case within IT, but also to engage the Finance department and procurement particularly.  We’re already planning to hold a workshop session for all our heads of IT, but maybe we should do something similar, in scope if not in size, to sell these other departments the benefits of what we’re trying to do.

Quantify the true costs of not doing ITAM well

We’ve spent a lot of time identifying the direct costs of not doing ITAM well, but we haven’t spent much time looking at indirect costs – the amount of time people waste because they don’t have the data they need at their finger tips, for instance.  We’ve just done some licensing reviews – if I survey the people involved, perhaps I can build an idea of the time they spent and then multiply it out by the internal Full Time Employment (FTE) rate and add that to the direct costs we’ve already identified.

Find the synergies with other projects

I’ve spent the last week talking to all sorts of different people about the projects they are involved in. Similar themes kept cropping up again and again, for instance data security and SAM need to know exactly how many machines are in the organisation so they can be sure they all have anti-virus or a discovery tool installed and can identify and locate those machines which have fallen through the holes of the process. There are lots of other synergies out there to include in the business case too.

Prioritise

There are a lot strands to an ITAM project, so I’m thinking of outlining them all, identifying who will benefit and how, and making sure we understand the dependencies not just between ITAM projects, but also with the other projects going on in the organisation. It will be complicated, which may detract a little from the clarity of the business case, but it will allow the organisation to assess each project relative to the others and decide what to tackle first.

Hopefully including some of these ideas will make my business case a lot more powerful than it would be otherwise…  I’ll keep you posted.