A formidable productivity lever, software has also become one of the main items of IT expenditure and a source of legal, financial and technical risk. The managing of software assets is therefore a major challenge for any organization.

Yet managing software is a task that has proven extremely onerous for many organizations for a number of reasons:

• The diversity of licenses among publishers. Often individual publishers will have a number of licenses that an organization has to grapple with
• Licenses …
  

Leveraging our expertise, we have outlined five best practices for implementing a genuine software management policy that is pragmatic, progressive and effective.

1. Establish the organization’s software policy

The software policy establishes the organization’s software objectives. It expresses the organization’s strategic, technical and budgetary choices. It must therefore involve the management of the organization as a whole. The IT department must monitor its implementation. An essential element of the software policy is the software library, the list of software that is authorized within the organization and its allocation per population of users, …