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CurioValue combines diagnostics, consultancy and support services to define opportunities and turn them into outcomes and operational improvements.
This page provides a flavour of the topics we cover, but your situation is unique. Get in touch for a no obligation discussion.
There is opportunity to make significant savings – sometimes over 30% – with small steps able to deliver double digit returns within months.
Realising value requires focus on areas that (a) have potential to deliver results and (b) are realistic for your environment. The greatest success comes from being openly curious, self-challenging and seeking constructive dialogue with stakeholders. Data can both guide and support for decision making.
Whether you are at an early stage or have a robust ITAM ecosystem, there is always potential for further gains.
At the simplest level SAM helps get the right level of entitlements to fuel your business whilst minimising wastage and compliance risks. When you know what you have, use and need, it is possible to right-size for commercial and operational efficiency.
Being able to transform data into reliable information and decision making support enables a diverse set of additional use cases that span many stakeholder groups and business processes such as:
- When you know what you have, use and need, it is possible to right-size for commercial and operational efficiency. SAM can support a wide range of functions and business processes such as:
- Security operations prioritisation of risk protection and remediation options including end of life, policy breaches, and publisher issues.
- Procurement structuring of purchasing models, methods and timetables, including rationalisation and consolidation. Knowledge provides power to pro-actively drive renewal negotiations.
- Insight for enterprise architects in planning IT infrastructure, including enablers and restriction for migration to and from public and private clouds.
- Opportunity for transformation teams to enable productivity and reduce functional overlaps. This helps to lower operational and support costs for IT operations.
- Legal, ESG / sustainability, and vendor management teams to have clarity over contractual positions and alignment to organisational standards and aspirations.
- Improved IT project team and end-user experiences through easy request, approval and provisioning, as well as supporting automation through joiners, movers and leavers activity.
- Finance teams can budget accurately and use activity based costing to allocate and recharge to regions, functions and cost centres.
- ITAM groups can deliver informed cost containment through licence modelling and pragmatic harvesting processes that extends into hardware.
CurioValue has experience and from publisher, service provider, tool manufacturer and end-user organisational perspectives. Whether you are new to SAM or looking to advance a mature operation, a no obligation consultation can only help – at worst you will confirm what you know; at best you will see a path to enhancing your own standing, ITAM operations and organisational performance.
Cloud FinOps
Cloud services has transformed the IT landscape and provided tremendous flexibility. Whilst innovation has enabled so many organisations to provide more for customers, supply chains and employees, commercial acuity has lagged behind. Spending has continued to increase, regularly going over budgeted levels.
Whilst awareness of waste has greatly increased, the value gap and opportunity cost remains huge for many organisations – reports often show this to be between 25% and 35%, but there are many examples where it is significantly higher. Even those that have a mature cloud centre of excellence (‘CCoE’) are likely to have realisable efficiencies of over 10%.
Success in FinOps is a the team sport that connects data, insights and stakeholders in a pragmatic way.
SaaS FinOps
Industry reports state that SaaS spend is growing by any measure: share of IT budgets, number of applications, average cost per user, vendor price points and overall outlay etc.
Licensing complexity is a factor due to increasing functionality, product bundling, suites, free and chargeable pre-requisites and add-ons. This is especially true with larger publishers. Access is easier to provision than monitoring allocations, the utility of consumption, and applying cost-centric governance.
SaaS management needs to consider HR (joiners, movers, leavers), control (IT security, data processing), productivity (functional access, enablement, adoption), and finance (budgeting, purchasing, recharging), making optimisation an art rather than a science.
CurioValue can help you achieve the right balance of value for money, visibility and support for organisational agility.
Complexity is inevitable in the procurement and management of technology products and services:
- The sheer volume of technologies – large business are likely to have products from 500 or more producers, software publishers and suppliers. Smaller companies will have over a hundred.
- A range of purchasing channels – outsourced activity, aggregation from resellers, direct purchasing (online and offline), marketplaces and portals.
- Many products have different buying options such as bundles, tiers, editions with variations between release versions, geographies and time.
- For initial and larger purchases, deals have nuances such as pricing promotions, additional rights, conditional concessions or special conditions.
- Organisations can have different purchasing channels beyond central procurement functions, including through expenses, departmental budgets and ‘app store’ style portals.
- There are differences between strategic or high value acquisitions and tactical buying of more commoditised products (tail spend).
Even when suppliers, channels, options and methods are similar and buyers have influence on suppliers, there are nuances in terms, particularly with software and cloud services. This all creates a burden to manage data completeness, quality and contractual governance challenges. A major impact is cost inefficiency.
There is never sufficient resource to fully manage the breadth of technology procurement topics, so attention is focused and compromise is required. Technology sprawl and overlaps are expected, as are variations and gaps in diligence levels. This causes contractual exposures, limitations, increased administration, purchasing costs. Financial waste is a by-product, accentuated by the highly inflationary nature and constant change driven by technology producers.
Over time, the backlog builds and can become unmanageable. Organisations cannot afford to pause and remediate, with purchasing teams needing to deal with daily operations and strategic supplier relationships. A quick review, even using imperfect data, can identify opportunity to:
- Reduce costs by buying what is needed, in the right way, at the right time.
- Mitigate impact of price increases and commercial changes from a position of knowledge.
- Streamline operations and overheads through consolidation and planning in advance.
- Proactively contribute to business units and IT planning discussions, rather than be a required stakeholder after decisions are made.
Exposure to thousands of reviews and projects shows several themes, even when sincere efforts are observed:
- Value is left on the table – often because of the asymmetry of experience or information.
- Efficiency and performance levels in the real world drop below expectations, aspirations or forecasts.
- There is never a perfect alignment to policies and organisational goals.
- Risk does not disappear and non-compliance is pervasive.
Make sure that you get the right deals and they operate effectively, deliver in your favour and support positive supplier, customer and partner ecosystems.
Agreements are negotiated with the best of intentions: to enable customer organisations to benefit from technology solutions. There are several common reasons for value to be left on the table.
- Information asymmetry weights the contracting game towards vendors. They know the parameters for a good deal and sell to their advantage every day.
- Opportunity cost of rigour – there is never sufficient time to understand, plan and negotiate all the potential issues and limitations in a deal. Onerous commercial terms or challenges arise either when transacting, upon renewal or seeking change.
- Ubiquity of deltas – taking software for example, under-licensing means remedial costs; over-licensing means wastage. Both can coexist. You will be paying for things you do not use or are not getting full value from.
- Moving goalposts – change to packaging and pricing is almost as constant as the advance of technology itself. This is deliberate and usually designed to increase spending. Even commoditised products and full-function bundles are altered, meaning genuine ‘like for like’ can be rare.
- Crystal balls do not work – organisations transform, needs change, shocks occur, technology develops and assumptions are not perfect. The only confident prediction to make is that what is required and optimal now will be different in the future.
Fortunately CurioValue and our network has the ability to achieve better commercial deals fit for now and the future. Talk to us about vendor specific goals or programmatic optimisation.
No organisation is an island. They each operate in a unique ecosystem of customers, suppliers, partnerships, regulations, cultures and macro-environmental influences. Entering into agreements helps to unleash benefits for the parties involved.
Intentions are typically good and collaborations often align many objectives for mutual benefit. Conflict however, is inevitable, and is much wider than the innate yearning to get the best commercial deal. A balance needs to be struck between the goals and behaviours you desire from third parties and the workable realities. For example:
- Ambition to report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting and standards versus the feasibility and impact of doing so.
- Commitment to and certification against regulations such as modern slavery, anti-bribery and corruption or data protection, and minimum criteria around IT security, ethics or working practices.
- How to bridge the gap between standardised terms from suppliers – such as end-user licensing agreements (EULAs) or terms of service – and criteria for protections driven by legal, technical and governance groups.
- The level of legislating for changing circumstances, unlikely or unforeseeable events versus the ease of doing business and adjusting your risk appetite.
Tackling this can seem daunting or a perennial desire for tomorrow, but even small steps towards improvement can drive competitive advantage.
Trust but verify remains a worthy maxim. Third parties are vital in providing success, from broadening your reach to enabling solutions. No matter how good relationships are, it is likely that you are leaking value in these relationships or generating risk for yourself. The scale may be tolerable; it is worth finding out.
It is natural for the reality of operations to differ from expectations, and almost invariably favour the agent rather than the principal. Transgressions are rarely deliberate ploys, but the balance of judgement calls, calculations and behaviours can have a large impact on commercial results and non-financial risks.
There are effective ways to discover and remediate issues amicably. The dreaded A word (audit) does not need to be invoked either. Let’s book a discussion to explore the possibilities.
The business ecosystem continuously evolves. Adaptation is critical to functions and organisations remaining viable. Getting there and is an enjoyable journey too, often with innovative paths followed.
With focus on successfully implementing change, governance will tend to lag behind operations. Issues and limitations arise in the most well intentioned environments. With teams driven to achieve functional goals, adherence to processes and policies, and attention to data, quality and control are lower priorities. The impact is reduced efficiency and limited insight for making coordinated decisions.
A path to improvement is often simple, and can be inexpensive. Defining the route usually requires taking a step back or pausing to reflect on potential benefits to different organisational groups.
When seeking to manage technology spend and third-party relationships, there are three truisms:
- There will never be enough time to do what you need;
- Whatever you do, there is room for improvement; and
- There will be exceptions, nuances, omissions and obstructing behaviours.
An ideal world would have automated processes to assess, source, procure, manage, renew and retire assets, entitlements, services and subscriptions. The technology and solutions market is not fully rational, inefficiencies exist despite the best efforts of procurement and advances in technology. There will be incomplete information and sub-optimal activity, from a web of internal and external forces, no matter how well intended they are.
How do you balance control and optimisation for your culture, without expending too much effort in enforcement? CurioValue can help you to get the right setup: policies and enablement that drive positive behaviours, remediation support, and implementing financial and risk management practices.
Whilst tools enable optimisation, accelerate processes and provide insights, they are not created equal. There is huge variation in functionality, quality, integration and usability. Pricing can vary wildly and is not necessarily correlated with outcomes. In fact, many organisations could address a lot of their use cases with what they already have.
The right solution will depend on your current objectives, specific requirements, and future aspirations. Tooling tends to be focused on SAM, FinOps, contract management, purchasing or workflows with crossover into other disciplines and overlapping use cases. This can lead to bloated costs and an overload of discovery, conflicting data processing and reporting dashboards which can create friction and negative synergies. Consideration should be given to tangential benefits beyond cost containment, reducing waste and mitigating compliance. For example:
- Feeding IT functions with valuable information around security, product lifecycles, device status.
- Helping coordinate demand management and purchasing lifecycles.
- Facilitating finance to build budgets forecasts, and accurate cost recharging, whilst also demonstrating return on investment from cost management investments.
- Managing change including ‘JML’ (joiners, movers, leavers) processes as well as M&A (mergers and acquisitions), divestments and restructuring.
- Supporting transformation and adoption through consumption processes and scenario modelling.
- Enabling governance and risk management functions including internal audit, compliance, legal, and ESG initiatives.
- Improving workflows and user experiences through request management, deployment, access provision and reclamation.
An experienced tradesperson knows which tools are needed, superfluous as well as when specialist skills or resources are required. They will balance execution and ongoing maintenance to the client purpose. Is it a quick fix for a specific area or a long term solution to be used by many stakeholders? Will the work cause disruption or deliver in the background? Selecting tooling to optimise and govern IT related assets should have similar considerations.
CurioValue has seen the full gamut: leading edge suites with speciality add-ons have delivered fantastic results whilst others have simply caused resource sinkholes. Similarly, simple setups that leverage existing tools have delivered enormous returns as well as being little more than papering over major cracks. We would be delighted for you to get the right solutions at the right cost.
One of the biggest challenges for improvement activity (such as SAM, ITAM, FinOps, vendor and partner management) is that processes are not self-contained. Sponsorship and responsibility may not sit in a specific business function.
The ability to deliver value is impacted by the engagement of different groups. Whilst they may have overlapping objectives, attention will be diverted elsewhere. This is true even when the department stands to gain great utility from improvement activities – see the tooling assessment section for examples.
The impact is that investment can be hard to obtain and progress slow with meagre returns. CurioValue can help shape your approach to drive support for initiatives and realise benefits that achieve your goals and those of IT, centralised functions and distributed business units alike.
Service providers have a wealth of expertise and experience. There is so much potential to add value to their clients and customers. Certain themes – which can conflict with each other – commonly restrict how this is translated and exploited for mutual benefit.
- An absence of, or resistance to, friendly contrarian challenge or suggestions for improvement.
- Limited exploration of synergies from collective areas of competence.
- Placing capabilities that exist above client needs and outcomes.
- Diluting clarity through the sheer volume of benefits, functionality or use cases.
- Hollow messaging – buzzwords and overselling without compelling meaning or substance.
Plot a path to unlock success
Service providers and suppliers have fantastic value to offer to clients. This can be locked away, hampering benefit levels for your business and clients. Examples include:
- Focusing on the fantastic product, content, knowledge and skills at the expense of customer relevance.
- Lost opportunity cost from not combining capabilities effectively – in larger companies, organisational structures and performance objectives are prevalent barriers.
- Messaging that does not resonate with your potential buyers, users and influencers:
- Outcomes that you promote may not align with your audience’s goals.
- Flexibility can be perceived as a lack of confidence about the right path.
- Integration and ‘full-suite’ services can be viewed as an overloaded approach.
- An imbalance between the value proposition and the content – excess buzzwords and claims versus substance and backup.
- Solutions may be all powerful but this can lose an audience seeking a simple value proposition and use case.
- Commercial models with limited equity between investment, returns, risks and commitment – the decision to allocate scarce funds needs to exceed the current status and plans.
- Hidden barriers and misalignment across marketing, sales enablement, account management, pre-sales, operations, service delivery, support, finance and customer success functions.
- Layers of detail and the transition between them – it is typical for ethereal concepts and precise methodologies to be in discord.
- An inability n scaling whilst maintaining quality and enhancing profitability.
CurioValue has years of experience curating services and tuning solutions that comprise a range of capabilities. We can help deliver compelling offerings that can propel you to returns that your hard work deserves.
Build and adapt clear propositions that can land well.
Discover hidden insights that can make you irresistible internally and externally.
Objective, constructive critique from a client perspective.
Strategic planning of options, variables and deployment.