Save License cost using ServiceNow Performance analytics in Subscription management

One of the common pressing issues ServiceNow owners face is managing licenses effectively. ServiceNow offers applications that can be used to address the challenges surrounding software inventory and license management. Using analytics to manage licenses, enterprises can drastically reduce costs associated with software purchases, forecast licensing needs and minimize disruptions which arise from compliance audits.

To optimize licenses, companies must first identify user groups and the subscriptions they are utilizing. User groups are generally formed by managers who add everyone that are part of their team. But it is important to realize that every role comes with a cost. It is necessary to focus on group members’ roles and their license consumption to utilize the assets effectively. It is critical to understand the needs of the user before assigning them with roles. Here are some ways for license optimization:

Be strategic in license provisioning. Many users may not even use the application effectively to justify them having a license.
Downgrade access to employees who don’t need the full suite of functions from a particular application.
Reduce the number of redundant applications within the enterprise
Automatically identify and harvest duplicate and unused subscriptions.
Enterprises must have a continuous process like a governing policy to manage Saas based licenses.

How to implement license optimization with performance analytics?

A ServiceNow owner can assign different roles to a user. Overtime, the roles and responsibilities of the user may change and the licenses allotted to them may become redundant. Even though it was justified to give access to a user at one point, after a few years and many changes later, enterprises seldom go back and validate the roles and check if the licenses are being used. Is there any way to check if users are utilizing the licenses allotted to them to their full capacity?

Yes, with performance analytics. It is a decision support system for enterprises which gives enough data to help product owners manage licenses. It is highly important to understand a user’s usage before adding or removing them. Data is scattered across various tables of ServiceNow. There is no single dashboard to get the details on subscriptions and role usages. Performance analytics gives meaning to data and provides insight reports. But product owners will not be able to make informed decisions with these reports alone. They need to dig deeper to find patterns and trends. The Analysis is done based on Roles and Transactions

Using performance analytics, we can acquire user login data. This is to check if a user has logged into the application in the recent past and try to find out if they have been using the license. But this too is not enough to make decisions. Next, we can track user session time. This is to check the duration of a user’s session and determine if it justifies the license. If we dig even deeper, we can look into user transactions made by different users. Using this data, we can split them into different user groups and departments to better understand who is actually using a software.

Aspire License Workbench: The effective way for license optimization

ServiceNow subscription module comes in the out of the box feature where product owners can see the details regarding the licenses purchased, compliance and also manage users. Though it has all the details regarding the subscription, the subscribed user list is not calculated automatically and has to be entered manually. To overcome this drawback, Aspire’s License Workbench has come up with a one-stop dashboard to take action on the generated report by managing and controlling user’s access and also see real time data on subscriptions.

Features of License Workbench:

Aims to bring analytical and actionable items under one dashboard
Using metrics, it gives real-time data on licenses owned, allocated and available
It allows you to remove access to unused roles associated with the subscriptions and inactive users to enhance efficiency.
It can analyze sub-optimal usage of ServiceNow instances and assigned roles.

Aspire Systems has come up with this proven-solution which has helped enterprises optimize licenses and fix issues in software asset management. As a premier partner of ServiceNow, Aspire Systems can help you cut down licensing cost through implementation of License Workbench in the NOW Platform.