Being able to perform on-demand compliance checks for individual products is extremely important to daily business operations. It means the difference between minutes and hours when waiting for a software request to be fulfilled. So how do you get away from consulting a spreadsheet and upgrade to immediate, reliable, compliance checks?

When an employee requests software, he doesn’t want it tomorrow or in two weeks. He doesn’t even want it today. He wants it now. But you’ve got to make sure that the software is correctly licensed.

You have to perform mini compliance checks, a single product check. This can be anything from consulting a spreadsheet to looking for a colleague who is the only person in the company that has a clue about the software. Neither of which are very reliable or timely.

Fulfilling a software request is more complicated than the person requesting the software can even begin to imagine. There are so many angles that have to be covered when allotting licenses: is there a central enterprise agreement (EA) with rights to the software? Do you know the conditions of the EA? What about downgrade rights, secondary use rights, parallel use rights? All the product use rights granted by the license simply cannot be recorded in a spreadsheet or memorized by one person.

This information must be recorded in a database. It needs to be recorded automatically as soon as the licenses are purchased. The license is tied to the software product by the manufacturer part number, also known as the stock keeping unit or SKU. So if you can record the SKU you can automatically create license entitlement data and maintain a license inventory.

But in order to do a mini compliance check you need a license inventory and a software inventory. The data provided by your discovery/scanning/inventory tool is sorted to record installations. Again, the SKU plays a role here. The installation signatures generated by the scanning tool are directly related to the software product, which is uniquely identifiable by the SKU.

License --> SKU --> software product.
Installation signatures --> software product.

This is what your software license management tool needs to do for you. Then, when a software request is triggered you can do an on-demand mini compliance check and immediately act to fulfill the software request.

Now that you have all this free time on your hands, what are you going to do? How about evaluate your organization’s license management processes; improve and enforce them. Tackle maverick buying, ensure usage of enterprise-wide agreements instead of local ones, and clean up your software budget.

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