Steve Watts - Feb 08, 2008 05:51pm

Share with us the most pressing software related issue you face today.

Hi Steve

In answering your question I have taken ‘Pressing’ to mean ‘Most difficult to solve’, this may seem a bit of a liberty, my excuse is therefore that this problem can also be deemed as ‘pressing’ as non-compliance carries with it until resolved, significant reputational and fiscal risk.

The establishment and maintenance of a position of entitlement is probably the greatest software related challenge for an enterprise today, requiring many difficult steps along the way, a few being

Acceptance of centralised ‘ownership’ of software within an enterprise
Creation of a Definitive Software Library
Establishement of clearly defined and controlled points of entry for software into an organisation
Restrictive permissions as standard on desktops/laptops (this is one of the easiest bits)
A ‘compliance’ culture at every level of the organisation, especially within IT and the senior leadership
A workable process and a tool for recording and determining entitlements
A technology capable of reconciling installation and usage with entitlement in order to determine compliance.

The last requirement I have identified is something that seems obvious but is really hard to do well (a bit like integration), consequently I’ve seen products which attempt to rise to the challenge but don’t really stand up under close examination to either the scaling or maintainability that an enterprise would need, partly as I think we’re getting into another requirement for flexible patterns in order to deliver a solution that would work and that I would imagine is far harder and more expensive to build into a software product than something of a more static nature.

It is find interesting that most organisations realise compliance is hard, it is revealing that instead of making the cultural, technical, resource and process commitment to managing the problem that in my experience they almost all either offset the risk by overbuying or attempt token compliance by reconciling those licenses which are easiest to understand and manage (or where vendors are most vocal).

Hi Steve,

Could we feature a poll on the home page to perhaps get a larger number of contributors?

CHeers,

Richard.

The main concerns are as follows

1. A Business Process uses Multiple Services
2. Multiple Services uses multiple software
2A. Multiple service also depends on other services
3. Multiple software resides on multiple hardware.

Therefore the most pressing software related issue is to find out which software supports which service and eventually which business process