SAM Charter – What’s Next…

SAM Charter – What’s Next…..

After a 15 month SAM engagement through Brillio (thank you guys for considering me – it’s been an absolute blast – please get your people to contact my person: I’d love to go again). It’s now time to put my SAM Charter suit on once more and get proactive with my plans for SAM global domination!

A new SAM ecosystem:

The aforementioned engagement called for a SAM ecosystem, but customised to their unique requirements. The basis for which was the ITAM Accelerate Process Kit. Nothing brings out the ex-sailor in me more than having to do something that I do not want to do! But what this did give me the chance to do was to model the template ecosystem before customising it for the client – so I guess I should be grateful! The template ecosystem is available here from ITAM Accelerate, or if you prefer SAM Charter branding, then our whitepapers page can help you out. At SAM Charter, we’ve also had the ecosystem translated into French, Spanish and German.

An Attribute and Entity Tracker:

For me, ARIS is the gift that keeps on giving. This is the EPC (Event-driven Process Control) modelling framework we use to such a positive effect with our clients. Part of the due-diligence we applied when crafting the ITAM Accelerate Process Kit was to rationalise the Job Roles that ARIS mandates you apply to each and every function step of a process. This simple, but powerful RACIU chart permits you to know who is engaged with which processes and to what level of engagement. The “U” stands for “Used” – we’ve also integrated another demand of ARIS whereby we’ve shown which systems and applications are used alongside the RACI/ personnel values. The benefit of this is that if you decide to swap out your SAM Suite (as an example) you will know instantly which processes that impacts.

An exercise we hadn’t done was to rationalise the data that goes in and out of the function steps: But now we have! The Entity and attribute tracker permits you to select an ITAM entity (e.g. “contract”) and using Excel slicers, see in a heartbeat where “contract” appears to be engaged with throughout the kit, but without having to read every process map.

Once more, the use-cases for this tool are legion:

Helping those on the fringe of ITAM know when and where their entities are engaged within the ITAM world
Helping Info Sec know when assets are created, written to, read, deleted or archived
Helping to streamline data management between adjacent IT disciplines such as ITAM and ITSM (super-helpful for CMDB & CI alignment)

Top tip – If you change the data elements in the process map, don’t forget to cascade those changes to the Entity and Attribute Tracker.

This dot-release of the Process Kit will be available imminently (Version 3.1).

Lego!

I’ve made several posts on LinkedIn about my re-discovered love of Lego due to the modelling of Formula 1 cars. I have now completed all four models that are at 1/8th scale, enhanced by custom stickers from Will Johnson. The final PR/ goodwill post is available here.

ITAM Maturity Assessment:

Some time ago, I was informed that the code behind the SAM Charter Maturity Assessment was being sun-setted. So I approached Licenseware, ITAM Intelligence and SAM Beast Consulting to create a premier instance of an ITAM Maturity Assessment. This is now up and running and like its predecessor, can be white-labeled or offered direct to end-user organisations. To understand where you sit with ITAM maturity to an ISO19770-1 level, visit this Licenseware page for more details.

SAM Surgery:

Now that I am an ITAM “gun for hire” again, I will be promoting the merits of our SAM Surgery. This two-day engagement contains a maturity assessment, analysis of the findings and a copy of the ITAM Accelerate Process Kit. Off the back of a SAM Surgery you will know:

Where your organisation stands with ITAM
Where it needs to go
And how to get there

Workflow Automation:

This is where I need your help folks: I am looking for a ServiceNow customer who is struggling with SAM-Pro. Too often, missing workflows between SAM Pro and the CMDB prevents Deming Cycle improvements in ITAM. This would also attack the veracity and accuracy of the CMDB. If you know of just such an organisation, please let me know.