Local Governments Tackle Software License Management Complexities

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. It can be a challenge.

“I have more than 40 departments that are doing more than 40 different things, from policing and fire to homelessness solutions and water, transportation, public works. They all do not move in unison,” he says.

Across those various departments, there are licenses for Microsoft, Adobe, Flexera and various others. Like other CIOs, Gardner needs to optimize those licenses to ensure users have what they need, and that the city is not overpaying to support unused licenses.

It’s a complex undertaking, but managed service providers and the appropriate tools can help.

Experts say that for many cities, third-party vendors can assist in managing the licensing situation.

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.

Click the banner to see how other organizations leverage cloud for better outcomes.

Today, with just a laptop and a browser, “you can go and sign up for whatever type of tool that you’re looking for,” he says. “A managed service provider can help take care of that shadow IT and SaaS sprawl. They can do things like a SaaS audit, for example. They can get insight into not only the number of licenses being used but who is using what, and how often.”

Such managed services bring both expertise and added hands to the effort. “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.

“This is something that the managed service providers are looking at already. And they may already have recommendations that they can bring forward — positive things they have seen other cities do, or noting mistakes they’ve seen others make,” he says. “Managed service providers are a key cog in the IT machine.”

DISCOVER: SMaaS provides a new way to experience ServiceNow.

Governments Seek Help to Manage Licensing Sprawl

At the International City/County Management Association, CIO Hemant Desai knows this firsthand. Prior to joining the association, he served as CIO for Guilford County, N.C., where third-party help was crucial in managing licensing.

As with many municipalities, “we always had constraints around resources, whether that meant financial or staffing,” he says. Challenged to keep up with enterprise-software licensing sprawl, “we often relied on third-party vendors.”

“We worked extensively with CDW. We purchased Adobe licenses, Microsoft licenses, and CDW was one of our prime vendors,” Desai says. When it came to license management, “they helped us a lot in overseeing utilization and optimizing — not so much minimizing licenses but optimizing by reviewing licenses we owned across the entire organization.”
 

Much of that support came in the form of ongoing reporting, which not only identified redundant licenses but also ensured compliance, helping the city demonstrate that it was using its licenses appropriately.

“For compliance, you always need to make sure that you are on top of the licensing. Having a managed service provider can help by being proactive in providing alerts on upcoming compliance and licensing changes,” Desai says.

“That was important for us, making sure we are not behind the curve and mitigating instead of being proactive. The ‘how’ was through constant reporting, proper reporting. When the time came for a compliance audit, I didn’t have to ask my team. We had the reports already, due to our regular quarterly interaction with our MSPs,” he says. “It allowed me to use our internal resources for purposes other than managing software licensing complexity.”

RELATED: Application rationalization can reduce application sprawl.

Software Licensing Benefits from Centralized Effort

A centralized approach to software licensing helps, giving IT leaders visibility into and control over the licensing landscape.

“You have to manage your software assets in a central place,” Gardner 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. You can use security tools, or you can use ServiceNow for discovery and learn that this machine has all of these applications, and this user doesn’t use these applications,” he says. “ServiceNow knows we have 15 of these Office365 licenses, and if we see this user isn’t active on Office365, we can reclaim that license and repurpose it to somebody that needs it,”

Gardner says it’s important to track version changes in software to avoid buying more than you need.

“Software vendors often will call something by a different name each year. You can end up with five versions, and you’re going to have to do some manual normalization — like, application A is really application B, because they changed the name,” he says.

It’s likely that an agency won’t need licenses for both, but it will need to know about those changes in order to adjust the licenses.

Effective Licensing Involves Communication

In Washington, D.C., Tehsin Faruk is in much the same boat. As COO in the city’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), she’s managing licenses for Oracle, Microsoft, ServiceNow and diverse other products across about 80 departments.

The scale can be daunting, “and the need to balance costs, compliance and operational efficiency adds to the overall complexity,” she says. “We’re also continually considering budget constraints, transparency and accountability issues. All of that combined makes it challenging.”

Experts point to a number of strategies that city IT leaders can use to contain license sprawl. And Faruk has formalized the centralization effort with the recent launch of the Enterprise Contracts and Licensing Program. Its core mission is “to provide dedicated technology contracts and software licensing management support to the city,” she says.

The program is working to establish a standard process for taking on new software licenses in order to drive more effective license management. “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.

EXPLORE: How to be tactical in the wake of VMware’s acquisition. 

The city is also using ServiceNow and other software asset management tools to track license usage. Faced with the need to minimize underused licenses in a tight budget climate, “these tools have been extremely effective in helping us optimize software licenses so we can reduce waste and fraud,” she says.

Faruk says that close cooperation between IT and end users also helps to ensure appropriate licensing. “We work with agencies in a holistic manner to figure out what their needs are. Then, we try to assign licenses to only folks that will be utilizing them,” she says.

The city works to ensure the right people have the right type of licensing, “so that at any given time, we’re not sitting on a lot of underused licenses,” she says. “We do that through our software asset management tools, and we do that through continuous engagement with our agencies.”