Situation 1: Smoothing Peaks and Valleys

A large USA Health Company — let’s call them ‘The Hospital’ — with around 50 Hospitals and over 100,000 employees, had been targeted numerous times a year for audits from different software vendors. Each year, millions of dollars of unbudgeted costs and wasted company hours was sent down the drain to keep these constant audits at bay.

The company outsourced their IT operations to a third party; this third-party outsourcer controlled the Hospital’s data and was responsible for the Hospital’s IT Asset Management. The outsourcer had multiple tools in place that stretched across multiple organizations, with the majority of the Hospital’s assets managed on spreadsheets or data charts that were spread across various computers. When they were procuring software in the name of the Hospital, the Outsourcer purchased from multiple places and came up with multiple contracts, resulting in a confusing software licensing environment that was easy to lose track of. The Hospital also had no control over their own maintenance and software spend.

The Hospital was very active in acquiring and divesting portions of their industry. Having purchased other hospitals in the past that carried with them software compliance issues, this would mean that the Hospital often inherited millions of dollars in additional purchases and software licensing issues. The Hospital thought it was an important step in the merger and acquisition process to ensure both themselves and the new hospital understood the additional value of the two businesses combined software environment, through either combining contracts or keeping them separate. However, they couldn’t determine the best way to meld their assets without having a complete understanding of what each of their software environments contained.