Senior stakeholders decide whether to fund your ITAM and SAM programme. Treat them like investors: work out what each group actually needs, then show the data you can already give them.
The modern world is one of increasing technological complexity, and it pushes hardware and software asset management teams to the limit in controlling and optimising IT environments that keep expanding and diversifying.
Cloud-first strategies add another dimension: cloud sprawl, Shadow IT and bill shock, all of them immediate rather than theoretical. Wasted cloud spend runs at 29%, and it rose for the first time in five years. Combine that with wider economic pressure and organisations are being asked to reduce costs, improve governance and security, and stay compliant — at the same time.
Hardware and software asset management contributes to all three. Which is why ITAM and SAM are starting to hold the attention of senior management and C-suite executives, who increasingly see them as critical to strategic programmes like digital transformation and cloud migration. That is your opportunity to prove the value of the function, win stakeholder buy-in and get your own programme funded.
To drive an ITAM and SAM programme, identify your wider stakeholder groups up front and start treating them like investors.
Why investors? Because the decision whether to back you will be taken by several people and influenced by more. To secure that backing and get a seat at the table, the question you have to answer is not “what does ITAM do?” It is “why would stakeholder X invest in this?”
Senior stakeholders, like investors, care about three things:
Winning them over means demonstrating how you add value in those terms — theirs, not yours.
Here are the common stakeholder groups. You may have more, or you may be able to segment them into more granular value packages.
| Stakeholder group | How you add value |
|---|---|
| C-suite | Better governance and faster delivery of transformational change programmes such as cloud-first and digital business strategies. One position across hardware, software, SaaS, cloud and AI, rather than five tools that disagree. |
| Human Resources | Compliance with organisational policy on security and litigation exposure, plus data that supports onboarding and offboarding: which devices a leaver holds, which licences they still hold, and the revocation status of each one. A wasted-spend figure for licences still assigned to people who have left turns re-harvesting from an intention into a number. |
| Procurement | An effective licence position gives negotiations a defensible starting number instead of a vendor’s. Renewals surface with days-to-renewal alongside utilisation rate, which is the pair of figures that decides whether you renew at the same count. |
| Legal | The data and evidence needed for vendor audits. A continuous compliance position and an audit trail across agreements, transactions and exclusions means the evidence already exists when the notice arrives, rather than being assembled under a 45-day clock. |
| Finance | Budget planning and forecasting. Hardware and software requirements can be forecast and cross-referenced against existing inventory, so you buy what you are short of rather than what you assumed. Where costs need to be shared across departments or business units, pool-based showback and chargeback does it with forecast-aware overspend states. |
| IT | Straightforward visibility of a complex environment: exactly what hardware and software the organisation has, where it is and who uses it. Ten discovery methods across six operating system families land in one schema, so governance, procedures, upgrades and deployments get easier and more efficient rather than more fragmented. |
To deliver value across those groups and meet your ITAM and SAM objectives, work through six stages.
| Stage | Advice |
|---|---|
| 1. Identify stakeholder requirements | Talk to your stakeholder groups. Find out what they need, how you can support them, and — critically — what they would count as success. |
| 2. Develop an ITAM and SAM strategy | Build your strategy, processes and reporting around delivering those objectives and that value. This includes identifying and evaluating the platform you will run it on. |
| 3. Build a business case | Add measurable outcomes and metrics that benefit each stakeholder group, with anticipated return and cost-saving calculations that show the long-term value of the plan. |
| 4. Pitch the plan | Turn the business case into a pitch and present it to each group. Lead with their measure of success, not yours. |
| 5. Implement | With support and funding secured, deploy, automate your processes and put the strategy into practice — making sure data and insight flow continuously to the stakeholders who asked for them. |
| 6. Report return and added value | Report regularly against your forecast and break the metrics down by stakeholder group, so the value is visible continuously rather than at renewal. |
Stage six is the one most programmes under-invest in, and it is the one that determines whether you get funded a second time. It is also easier than it used to be. Realised savings, realised avoidance and return by fiscal quarter are produced as reporting rather than assembled by hand; an optimisation score tracks utilisation, response and adherence over time; and reports can be delivered on a schedule to Slack or Microsoft Teams, so the stakeholder sees them where they already work instead of in an attachment they never open.
The cloud side gives you a number to put in the business case at stage three. Certero’s average cloud cost saving across environments under management is 38%. Set against a 29% wasted cloud spend figure, that is a business case you can write down rather than assert.
Know your stakeholders. Know how you support them and how you add value to their objectives, in the terms they already use to judge everything else. Then show them the data you can produce, not the data you hope to produce.
That is how you win support for a strategy, and how you keep it.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Hybrid IT broke the ITAM tools built for the data centre. What unified discovery, software recognition and governance actually have to cover when your assets span on-premises, virtual, cloud and SaaS — and how to test a vendor against it.
FinOps was built for the cloud and stops at the data centre door. ITAM knows the assets and licences underneath. Neither is complete alone — and hybrid cost control needs both working from the same data.
Public sector IT budgets rarely stretch to everything on the list. Three places to find the money you already have — cost reallocation, getting more out of ageing assets, and an optimised licence position.
Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.