The Application Owner | IT Asset Management (ITAM) Roles & Responsibilities

Learn more here: www.anglepoint...
This video is about the Application Owner role. This will include understanding how this role works with the ITAM team to execute recommendations and realize some of the benefits coming from Trustworthy Data.
Aside from the day-to-day operations of ITAM, the Application Owner role is one of the critical components to ensuring that value is being delivered to your organization. Without the Application Owner, recommended Risk Mitigation steps would not be taken and optimization opportunities would go un-realized. You can think of this role as an ‘implementer’ of the recommendations coming from the ITAM team.
When we say ‘Application Owner’ we mean the role that is responsible for maintaining and supporting the applications and or technology stack for a specific software publisher. This may be one person (for example - an Adobe administrator), or it might be a coordinator of multiple people (for example - someone who manages all the teams responsible for Oracle in your organization).
The Application Owner is responsible for accurately understanding and representing the needs of the business to the ITAM Team as well as Procurement. If they are responsible for maintaining the Adobe estate (for example), they should be able to communicate the license requirement and associated forecast and roadmap. In other words - will there be more users of Adobe Acrobat Professional required? Is there a technology project coming up that will require more or less licensing, etc? Needless to say the stress is on ACCURATE representation of the needs of the business. A ‘thumb in the air’ approach or ‘take last years figure and add 15%’ is NOT what supports trustworthy data in the organization. In these scenarios if the Application Owner needs support it can be offered from the ITAM Team - for example a report might be run from the ITAM Repository indicating license consumption for the last 3 quarters for the Application Owner to confirm and verify. An accurate license consumption forecast is a KEY input to the strategic alignment of ITAM in your organization as this helps to influence recommendations to the Steering Committee.
The Application Owner needs to act on remediation requirements or optimization opportunities coming from the ITAM Team. As a result of analyzing your organization’s compliance position for a given software publisher there will be 2 main scenarios - first either a potential Risk exists that needs to be mitigated, or an Opportunity exists that can be realized. In either one of these cases, the Application Owner is the role who is Accountable to execute the necessary steps. This is an important distinction - the ITAM Team will make visible the situation but they will NOT act on it. For example if there is an over-consumption of Oracle licenses, the ITAM team will NOT deinstall an instance of Oracle or decommission a virtual server. Those actions are performed by the Application Owner.
If there is action to be taken by the Application Owner, this will be tracked by the ITAM Program Lead and monitored by the Steering Committee. This way, risks will be mitigated and optimization opportunities realized. Otherwise the Application Owner will have to answer to the executive sponsorship of the Program. Sometimes, there may be cost associated with implementing ITAM recommendations. For example - maybe there is an optimization opportunity where re-architecting a virtual cluster could save maintenance costs on Oracle licensing. Maybe this opportunity could save $300K over the next 3 years in maintenance costs. However, to rearchitect the virtual cluster would require a technical consultant team and would cost approximately $20,000 to implement. This is a scenario where the Steering Committee would need to approve that strategic direction. The ITAM Team would present this option to the Application Owner - and then the Steering Committee would vote to mandate the Application Owner and their department to spend the $20,000 in order to realize the cost avoidance opportunity of $300,000. In this way the visibility to the situation comes from the ITAM Team, and the strategic direction and mandate comes from the Steering Committee.