Partner Profile: SCC

 

 

Name

Stuart Pomfrett

How long have you been in SAM? 13 years
Area of Focus/ Specialism(s):

Everything that affects the technology lifecycle from SAM compliance risk assessments, stakeholder management, strategic development integrating the commercial, operational and technical inputs to generate a balanced software strategy.

Primarily, SCC’s ManageSMART services focus on risk and reward: we help customers understand the risks they either:

  • have and don’t know (‘Unknown Unknowns’) and help mitigate or fix and optimise
  • have and do know, but haven’t determined how to mitigate or fix and optimise
  • don’t have yet, but are likely to occur in the future and how to avoid it!

Ultimately it stems on how investment can be optimised by investing in business value driven solutions.

What is the biggest change you’ve seen in SAM since you started in this discipline?

The integration from a ‘SILO’ type discipline to realising that a number of an organisation’s departments utilise the same data sets and therefore a more integrated SAM discipline can be applied.

Also for the last 2-3 years a real upturn in SAM specific RFx and a SAM related question in more RFx for general software requirements indicate that there is a more central view to manage software effectively, either to avoid audit risk or to drive savings and efficiencies.

What gives you the greatest satisfaction about being in SAM?

Helping customers understand risks and to be able to offer tangible and significant savings for executing a SAM programme.  Whilst there is still a need for short term value gains to be demonstrated ‘in year’ (I.e. Savings to be delivered within 12 months), there is a view that a longer term approach will continue these savings and efficiencies.

Being able to tell customers that the business case justification did in fact become reality is the greatest satisfaction, if only to prove that 13 years working in this industry has garnered some level of justification!  It can and will save you money and make you more efficient and now we can prove it!

If you could change one aspect of SAM, what would it be?

My changes are two-fold; one old one and one new one:

Furthering the effective communication and education to the C-level that SAM is not a compliance report; whilst this is still a big driver relating to commercial risks, the reporting and mitigation of this risk is unlikely to fix the problem longer term. Utilising partners such as SAM Charter aids with understanding where the risks stem from, fixes the current problem and also addresses the route cause to ensure the risks won’t recur in the future.

I’d also like to work more efficiently with cloud programmes to ensure that the correct governance and process structures can be implemented to ensure that investments are there in the correct management.  So much we see of cloud spend is being ‘wasted’ because of a lack of governance or consumption models being too complex to map utilisation.  ManageSMART can and does help organisations manage this better!

How could someone contact you if they wish to discuss a SAM-related issue?

 

 

 

 

 

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