If you have just been appointed as a CIO or taken on another C-level position, you will have a lot of work to do to get an overview of where your company stands, the state of your department and the ground-work that your predecessor had done before handing the company over to you.

Your Priorities

Upon taking up your new position, the first thing that you should do is perform a software audit of your company to identify where you stand right now. If you are a CIO, one of the most important things you will want to determine is whether your predecessor was on top of the company’s software licensing. Companies such as Livingstone offer asset management software that can help you to track your licensing status and identify not only potential areas of non-compliance, but also licence overlap and potential cost-savings.

Your software audit will give you a clear overview of your current situation and will also highlight any areas where the previous CIO may have overlooked something. It is important that you do this as early as possible so that you can flag up that those oversights were the responsibility of the previous CIO. You don’t want run into issues later on in your appointment that you could be held liable for.

Planning for the Future

The software audit process will highlight current software usage patterns and will also provide you with a good opportunity to get to know the IT management team, explain your new position and find out about other issues in the community that you may need to address. It may be a good idea to perform a data audit and cleanse as a part of the software asset management audit.

With luck, you will find that your company has not knowingly been using unlicensed software. However, you may find instances where end users have installed third-party software on their machines – this is a common issue, especially in businesses that still use older operating systems such as Windows XP.

Once any issues have been identified, you can draw up a plan of action, identifying areas where improvement is needed and contacting vendors to negotiate new licences. You can bring your company back to a state of full compliance and put together a plan to ensure continued compliance from now on. This will ensure that when you are ready to move on yourself, you will be able to hand over to your successor smoothly and efficiently, confident that if they have an audit they will find no issues.

About the Author:

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Livingstone provide an end-to-end software asset management solution for organisations looking to gain complete visibility and control over their software licensing spend.

Combining their unique approach, accurate inventory and entitlement data with experienced Software Asset Management (SAM) specialists, they understand their client’s software licensing needs and goals. They arm their specialists with vendor agnostic Livingstone technology to provide real time licensing transparency and control.