A 2020-cycle read on CIO priorities — talent, devolved decision-making, culture, data, automation and new technology — and what each one meant for ITAM and SAM teams. Revisited with what the tooling can actually do now.
Talent, devolved decision-making, culture, data, automation and new technology adoption. All six featured in Wall Street Journal research into CIO priorities for 2020. All six had implications for whoever runs IT Asset Management and Software Asset Management.
Read back from here, the interesting thing is not that the predictions were right. It is which of the problems the tooling has since solved, and which are still down to you.
Recruiting technology talent was reported as a genuine business challenge, and anyone who has tried to build or hire an ITAM or SAM team knows how that feels in practice. Specialist licensing skills are thin on the ground, and a vacancy tends to sit open for a long time.
The second-order effect matters more than the first. Where recruitment is hard across the board, ITAM and SAM people get pulled sideways — backfilling into under-staffed programmes, producing data and guidance for teams rolling out new systems or replacing legacy hardware and software. That work is valuable. It is also not the work they were hired to do, and the core function quietly degrades while everyone agrees it is a good use of their time.
Alongside the recruitment problem sat a strong recognition that existing talent must be developed and given real decision-making authority. Training keeps skills current. But authority without capability is a formality, and the capability comes from tooling.
For ITAM and SAM that often meant confronting an uncomfortable fact: the technology in place was not fit for purpose. You can hand someone the authority to make a licensing call, but if the data underneath is three weeks old, publisher-normalised by hand and missing half the virtual environment, you have handed them the accountability without the means.
This extends well past ITAM and SAM. Large-scale transformation programmes push decisions outwards, and every stakeholder who gains a decision needs accurate, timely data to make it with. Devolving the decision while withholding the evidence is worse than not devolving it at all.
Most CIOs agreed they needed to do more with data. From an ITAM and SAM perspective two questions follow: what do you want to collect, and where do you want to analyse it?
On collection, ITAM and SAM tools have a reputation for gathering enormous volumes of data with a lot of noise in it. That is both fair and unfair. Plenty of tools — especially SAM tools — do not collect enough, and still manage to be noisy. Knowing what you need to collect belongs in tool selection, not in a remediation project eighteen months later.
On analysis, the 2020 answer was “there are powerful BI platforms, but getting data into them and learning to drive them are both real projects”. That was a fair statement of the market at the time. It is no longer a fair statement of ours.
CerteroX exposes a read-only API with a documented Power BI data source, so the BI route is a connection rather than an integration project. But most of the reporting never needs to leave the platform: trend charts, KPIs and threshold alerts; personal and role-shared dashboards; an Executive Dashboard rolling up applications, users, spend and trend; Data Agents and Reporting Agents running on schedules; report delivery into Slack and Microsoft Teams; raw cost export for anyone who genuinely wants it elsewhere.
The point the original article was reaching for still stands, though. Make reporting and analytics part of the tools selection process. The difference now is that the answer exists, so there is no excuse for treating it as an afterthought.
The number and diversity of people wanting access to what was historically “ITAM data” has kept rising. Finance wants cost attribution. Security wants configuration and exposure. Procurement wants renewal dates. Programme leads want to know what breaks if they move a date.
Serving all of them from one platform without handing everyone everything is a governance problem, and it is solved with structure rather than goodwill: Reporting Levels that restrict visibility by organisational unit or location, Zones for multi-entity data separation, role-based access control with granular permissions, and — in SaaS Management — a six-tier role model that includes a dedicated Auditor role. Give people the slice of the data their decision needs, with an audit trail behind it.
A large number of CIOs were pursuing new technologies, either to accelerate existing processes or to add capabilities they did not have. For ITAM and SAM teams that was framed as an opportunity to contribute to strategic initiatives from the earliest stages through to measuring return. Nobody in the organisation knows more about the current state of the technology in use, which puts these teams in a unique position to keep projects moving, avoid expensive surprises and give stakeholders visibility they otherwise would not get.
That was true in 2020 about cloud. It is more true now about AI, and the numbers move faster. Use of applications across the AI category has grown +181%, and AI-native application spend at large enterprises specifically has grown +393%. Very little of that arrives through procurement.
This is precisely the contribution the original article was describing, and it is now a product rather than an aspiration. CerteroX SaaS Management classifies AI tools from application feature tags in a catalogue of more than 35,000 applications rather than from a hardcoded list, so the detection set grows without anyone maintaining it. The Shadow AI Dashboard ranks adoption risk by the share of the organisation using each tool — ten people on a chatbot is a different problem to a thousand. OAuth grants are discovered and risk-scored on sensitivity, scope, consent and dormancy, and can be revoked in one click or by workflow. Each discovered tool carries a status: managed, blocked or ignored.
The team that already knows what the organisation runs is the team best placed to govern what it just started running. That was the argument in 2020. It has aged well.
The research supported a straightforward prediction: demand for ITAM and SAM expertise and data would increase. It did, and then it increased again when AI arrived as a fourth budget line nobody owned.
Teams that can meet that demand get recognised for it. Teams still fighting their own tooling are fighting a losing battle, and it costs them and their organisation. The one change since 2020 is that “the tools cannot do it” has stopped being a reason and started being a choice.
If you want to see what the reporting layer actually looks like, book a demo.
Other posts covering the same ground.
The Certero AI Assistant lets authorised users ask plain-English questions of live asset, software and licence data. It is off until an administrator enables it, and it can never return data the person asking is not already entitled to see.
Locking an application down at user level does not make you compliant with a per-device licence. In a Citrix or RDS environment, one user with access can cost you a licence for every device in the organisation.
A third-party summary of a vendor can be wrong, and it stays wrong for as long as people read it. The case for checking a vendor's facts at source — and the current, sourced record for Certero.
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.