When you are investing in software, it is important to make sure that its licensing is well managed for optimum utilization. ServiceNow offers a role-based software licensing model, which is essential to get a complete picture of its users and assign them to respective or different roles in order to provide access to specific applications relevant to their job responsibilities. As a ServiceNow user, your organization may have the required number of licenses. But if the user roles or licenses are not being handled efficiently, it is not maximizing the return on investments made into ServiceNow.
Let’s understand how you can achieve ServiceNow license optimization by managing your roles and subscriptions efficiently.
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ServiceNow License Management- How?
Streamlining ServiceNow license management helps you optimize your ServiceNow platform utilization. There might be some scenarios where a user is no longer in a particular role and their responsibilities have changed. Your ServiceNow Platform Owner should make sure that license utilization is in line with the users’ role status. Ensuring that there are no under-utilized or unused licenses or roles and that the relevant roles are assigned properly based on the users’ activity is important. Whenever a user moves to a different team or is assigned a different role or responsibility, or leaves the organization, that status should get updated immediately on the platform to avoid redundancy.
But how do Platform Owners effectively manage ServiceNow user roles and subscriptions across your organization? – by consistently monitoring whether the ServiceNow users are utilizing their roles effectively or not. However, it can be quite challenging. What platform owners have is data about the users and their roles. And harnessing that data with modern analytics tools can help in analyzing such data and provide insightful reports. Subsequently, those reports enable continuous monitoring and can steer ServiceNow license management decisions accordingly.
ServiceNow platform owners can leverage two of ServiceNow’s native solutions — 1. ServiceNow Performance Analytics that can extract and depict analytical insights from the user data 2. ServiceNow Subscription Management can help manage user roles and subscriptions better based on the insights — for license management and optimization.
1. ServiceNow Performance Analytics
ServiceNow Performance Analytics can extract the usage and role-based data and generates real-time analytical reports by evaluating how roles are assigned to users and how ServiceNow licenses are being utilized across the organization.
With ServiceNow Performance Analytics, the platform owners can get access to detailed charts and graphs, which can depict all user data analytically with every detail like how long users have been active in their respective roles, along with the changes if any.
ServiceNow Performance Analytics: A Use Case
A ServiceNow user who had been initially assigned an IT Service Management (ITSM) role is now not using the role properly or has been moved to a different team. The ServiceNow Performance Analytics can show the platform owners the details of such users who are not using their roles (or the license well) but are still assigned to the ITSM team. Based on these insights, platform owners can decide whether to remove the access or limit the user’s access to just the required capabilities on the platform.
2. ServiceNow Subscription Management
Now that the platform owners have detailed reports on license usage and performance with ServiceNow Performance Analytics, they would need the right solution to make the required role-based changes on the platform. It is here that ServiceNow’s Subscription Management application can help. It enables your platform owner to identify all of the ServiceNow subscriptions the organization has and how those are being used on various instances. They can get a complete picture of the allocated and unallocated licenses under each subscription. However, updating subscribed users list on the subscription management portal would involve a manual process.
Looking for expert insights into ServiceNow licenses or aiming to streamline license management?
KANINI’s License Workbench Application to Automate Subscription Management
KANINI’s License Workbench application is designed to automate the process of updating and managing the subscribed users’ data and to help platform owners determine which user needs a license. The License Workbench solution provides a more detailed and graphical representation of the subscription usage and the user list. It can be integrated with ServiceNow Subscription Management and empowers platform owners to make user role changes easily.
With all these in place, platform owners can take action on unused licenses, decide whether to add, remove or modify a user’s role based on their responsibility and ensure strict subscription compliance.
Taking the Right Steps with the Experts
When it comes to license optimization, it all boils down to how users are assigned roles on the ServiceNow platform and how well the licenses are managed. For businesses that do not have that license management expertise in-house, it would be beneficial to turn to ServiceNow partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
KANINI is a ServiceNow Premier Partner, handling license optimization processes for organizations across industries like banking and financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and other. If you’re looking to onboard the right experts for ServiceNow license management and get maximum value from your ServiceNow investments, get in touch with us.
Author
Ravi Rajamani
Ravi is the ServiceNow Practice Lead at KANINI. He brings close to 18 years of experience in the IT industry and has strong program & project management skills spanning ServiceNow, Resource Management, Solution Design, and Service Delivery. He has a proven track record of helping enterprise customers leverage ServiceNow platform efficiently.
