Local Governments Tackle Software License Management Complexities
Summary
In the city of Dallas, Interim CIO Brian Gardner needs to manage software licenses for a wide range of products, across a massive base of users. That kind of help becomes especially important at a time when it’s all too easy for city employees to bring in new software on their own, says George Smith, a member of CompTIA’s SaaS Ecosystem Advisory Council. “As the director of IT for a city or municipality, you have a lot of different things that you’re looking at, and something as niche and specific as license usage — that’s a big can of worms to open up, and maybe you just don’t have the capacity to look at it with the detail it requires,” he says. “We use ServiceNow and Flexera: They give us visibility and allow us to control the licensing, to have a better understanding of it.” To ensure users are supported, and redundancy minimized, “you need a tool that you can use to scan the environment. “We try to create visibility through publishing a single OCTO service catalog, and we are currently working on developing a playbook with best practices to simplify the overall acquisition process and to reduce costs by eliminating redundancy,” Faruk says.