Des données aux décisions : Analyse de l'utilisation des licences pour les équipes d'ingénieurs

[0:02] Mae: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. Welcome to Open iT’s webinar entitled “From Data to Decisions: License Usage Analytics for Engineering Teams.” My name is Mae and I’ll be your host for today. In the next 20 minutes, our speaker will talk about optimization and smarter license renewal analytics across regions and teams and navigating organizations and communication. Please feel free to send in your questions via the Q&A panel at the top of your screen. We’ll answer them after the main session. If we can’t get to all questions live, don’t worry. We’ll follow up via email or LinkedIn.

[0:43] Now, a quick intro to today’s speaker. Our speaker is a partnership manager for Open iT with 25 plus years of global leadership, product management, and geoscience experience in the oil and gas industry. He has worked in leadership roles for ConocoPhillips and BP in Europe and the US. His passion lies in using data not just for analysis but as a powerful storytelling tool that informs decision making and fosters innovation. Let’s give a warm welcome to David Bole.

[1:16] David: Excellent. Lovely. Thank you, Mae. A fantastic introduction as ever. Good afternoon, good evening, possibly good morning everybody. I’m speaking to you from Scotland today.

[1:28] So, I’m going to talk about how really good application data is the bedrock of really good and smart business decisions. How do you optimize and improve your license renewal cycle? How do you analyze that application and product information across regions and teams, particularly relevant in a large organization? And then when it comes to navigating that organization, how do you communicate? What are the tricks? What are the tips of how you make good decisions based on good data through an organization which can be large and disparate with many different parts to its management structure.

[2:16] So first of all, what is good data and how do you get it and how do you use it? The examples I’m going to give are primarily from the energy business, the oil and gas business, my experiences in subsurface, i.e. below the ground geoscience technology. However, any of the examples I talk about are relevant when you’re looking at high-value applications that are niche, specific to your industry, that probably are integral in really providing the value that your company needs. We often use the term engineering, but we’re looking at business industry specific applications and their complexity and their high cost, but also their value.

[3:02] So, as I say, the types of product I’m going to talk about are subsurface, geomodeling, well operations, petroleum engineering, reservoir engineering, that kind of thing. Reserves management. It’s really specialist stuff, but I say applicable across many industries. So when you’re getting quality data, what do you mean by quality data? Open iT specializes in providing a richness of application and product information.

[3:31] And we kind of refer to this pyramid of functionality. Level one, runtime usage. Who’s using it? When are they using it? What was their check-in? What was their checkout? What was their total hours? Where do they sit? How has that pattern changed over time? Are they getting any denials? Are they trying to use the application and not getting it? And all that information comes from license servers and it can give you a richness of information to allow you to make decisions upon. Building upon that, where applications merited, you have true active usage and that’s telling you when applications are actually being used. The user might start an application, load a bunch of data, get their session running, start doing work, but then be called away entirely legitimately, and they will then be logged as inactive or idle, tying up a license, which although their work process is merited and they’re doing the right thing, that shows that there’s a resource being tied up.

[4:30] So level three is manage usage where you look at that resource, if it’s not being used by a user you can take it back into a license pool and redistribute it across your organization to kind of give you best value for money and give you great flexibility. Those are the three levels of Open iT data.

[4:51] You get a huge amount of analytical power, graphs, who’s logged in when, how your licenses are doing, are there any concerns? You get a lovely heat map, times of the day, times of the year, times of month. Brilliant. I’m not really going to go into a lot of detail about those. We tend to cover those a lot in Open iT and I would encourage you to look at previous webinars or upcoming webinars in future or speak to our business consultants to see what that richness of data is. Today I’m going to talk more about what you do with that and how you make good business decisions based on that richness of information.

[5:35] So what’s an optimization workflow? You’ve got your good usage data. You’ve got your bill for your subscription or your perpetual license renewal which could be complex, many modules, base modules. It may have a time limit. It may have a renewal date that you need to make a decision by. All of which you need to think about. So what’s your process? You get all your information. Who’s using it? When are they using it? Are there any denials? Do you need to raise the level of some modules and lower the levels of others if you have capacity? Who are your top users? Very simple. Show me my top five users. Once you’ve gathered your top five users, and it may not be the people you expect, and it may be somebody in a far-flung part of the world that you need to identify, they are going to be crucial in your decision-making about what you do with your product, with them and the agreement of their management and the agreement of budget holders. You come up with a plan and then you can process that quote or that subscription bill and move on and get approval for that. But you can do it safe in the knowledge that you’ve done it with the best possible information that you can do it with.

[6:46] So you always ask these questions, who is using it? Should they be using it? Because sometimes users use an application because it’s easier, it’s more straightforward, it’s what they’re used to, but it may not be the approved application for their organization. It may not have the correct intellectual authority. You know, the company might want to be moving in a different direction. So, it’s always important to ask those questions. Is there an alternative? Because sometimes you might find that it’s being used by support when it should be used by the engineering users and support be able to get away with a license with lesser functionality that has a lower cost. It’s also good to ask the question, how good is your relationship with the vendor? Are they stable? Do you think your partnership will work over time? Can you influence their product development over time? All excellent questions to ask when you’re looking at this renewal process.

[7:44] Just some quick examples of the kinds of savings you can make with this type of basic optimization. By just doing that due diligence, looking at your numbers, looking at where there’s a gap, paying attention to denials, having a good open conversation with your vendors, you can make these savings. And often vendors you might think would be very resistant to some of these suggestions or some of these reductions. And that can be true, but equally they also want a partnership. And if you’re suggesting changes or optimizing your portfolio, it shows that you care and that you want to have that relationship ongoing. So it isn’t necessarily something that a vendor will be resistant to if you make changes to what you’re trying to offer. But I just wanted to make clear that some live savings are possible with this basic information. And you should always go after the large ones. You know, always sort by the highest one first and go for that one. But don’t forget about the long tail and that an accumulation of lower value applications like I’ve mentioned here, seismic sampling, rock physics, seismic surveying software, typically lower end of the cost scale but accumulatively can lead to a lot of value.

[9:04] So looking across regions and teams, what do I mean by that and why would you want to do it? Typically, you might be spreading the cost of these portfolios across a large organization. And it’s entirely plausible and appropriate for business units or groups to say, well, I want to know what I’m paying for. You know, I’m getting this charge back. I want to understand why that is. I don’t think I’m using it. If you’re armed with the best data, and a good way of looking at the data is to use perhaps a PowerBI dashboard. And I say Open iT can give you analytics through its own console. But with PowerBI customers often it gives them more freedom or allows them to integrate more information from their own organization particularly from active directory. It’ll give them really good information about who is using the software, when, where, and perhaps why. And it allows you to ask that question why. So regional analysis of software usage can be absolutely invaluable.

[10:00] Equally asking the question about what are job functions, and here I’ve focused on the area I know which is geologist, geophysicist, surveyor, perhaps support. Really good to know who those users are and then ask them why they’re using it and whether the configuration of license modules that you have is appropriate for those and might help you identify where you can have some cost savings if you allow people who are answering support calls to use a leaner version of an application rather than the one with all the modules that some of your higher powered users might merit. So this view is really really good when it comes to making smart business decisions and really helps you as well if you’re looking to enter into a negotiation phase for a change of contract.

[10:54] So there are a couple of examples I’m going to talk about here. Aspentech, who actually now in the subsurface oil and gas industry have a large library or portfolio of applications that spans, they’ve actually kind of accumulated different functionality from many different sources. And typically that’s been on a classic perpetual or subscription basis. But they will also offer a tokenization system where you have a big range of functionality but you don’t buy the individual applications, you buy tokens and you have a finite number of tokens and a user can go in and spend those tokens on different functionality. I want to do seismic sampling today. I want to do rock physics. I want to do petrophysics. And that’s very powerful. However, with great power comes great responsibility in that it can be hard to predict and a user can actually tie a large amount of resources up if you’re not careful. So modeling what you think your usage will be based on your existing subscription can be invaluable before you go into that negotiation about how many tokens you need, how are they going to be distributed, how are you going to use them.

[12:07] Again, making good decisions based on solid data. SLB’s PTS system, petrochemical system as it’s kind of, and it covers a lot, a huge amount of functionality with that suite. They offer a service where you go in as a user, so each user has a profile by which they have access to functionality and each user is classified by job function. And we looked at job function earlier across technical teams, geologist, geophysicist, reservoir engineer, but again it’s irrelevant what that function is. Open iT doesn’t care. It’ll give you that data on your company no matter what. And it also wants to know whether you’re a basic user or an expert user. And there’s a cost associated that may be different between the job function and the job function level. And you can also have an ad hoc user where you pay per day or a monthly user where you’re paying per month by that user. And of course an ad hoc user is relatively more expensive per day. So very quickly it becomes a very expensive way or potentially expensive way of getting access to the software. And you need good information before you enter those negotiations to understand what your profile of users looks like before you commit to how that’s going to be. So again, good data, good decisions.

[13:34] I talked before about the three levels of Open iT and the inactive versus active time and the ability to make decisions and make actions upon that. So this is an example of Petrel, an SLB product. It’s part of the PTS umbrella. This was an example where a huge amount of usage was actually idle. Now that isn’t to say that users were behaving badly. That absolutely isn’t the implication. It’s a very complex application, requires a lot of setup. But those inactive hours, because users were in meetings or they were busy, represents a huge resource that’s tied up and not being made available. So by implementing the level three, the managed license control, this company was able to really transform their usage because they were actually going through a time of growth and they wanted to give more functionality to more users. And by using license harvesting, license optimization, looking at the licenses that weren’t being used beyond a particular time threshold and reclaiming them into the license pool to be redistributed led to a really big jump in functionality. You can see it almost doubled their actual productive hours time in the space of a year for no extra cost. Very very powerful.

[15:06] This is actually a PowerBI dashboard showing what that is actually doing. So on their cloud infrastructure where they were tying up the licenses that were being run, the blue is showing you what’s in use. So you know you have a classic weekly cycle, obviously no usage or much less usage at the weekend, license usage peaking Wednesday, Thursday during the week, makes a lot of sense. Entirely normal. But the orange line there is the current suspended licenses and that peak there is actually 70 licenses. So you’re looking at the range there in the working day between 50 and 70 licenses that represent users who have the application open but they’re not using it and the license is returned to the pool and they’re able to give that to their colleagues. So it really frees up a lot of resources. This application, Petrel, is conservatively between $50 to $100,000 per user. So having 70 of those licenses available represents a large fiscal resource that you can redistribute. Very powerful.

[16:16] Okay, that’s data, that’s application usage, making decisions based upon that and how you manage harvesting. And so I just want to talk a little bit about how you communicate with an organization, how you’re making those changes or what things you can do to help you, particularly when it comes to something like managed license usage or license harvesting where you’re actively taking a resource and redistributing it. I think it does require careful handling and the right message that you give to users.

[16:51] With some of these processes, timing is very important. And this strange looking, vaguely geographical, looks a bit like a mountain graph represents cyclicity in an organization where expertise around product portfolios can vary and typically when the expertise around a product portfolio is diminished, just through staff attrition or whatever reason, downsizing, shadow IT can rise and leads to a divergence in your portfolio and inefficiencies and it can also lead to a larger total cost. And it’s exactly at that time when your shadow IT is on the rise that you need good data to be able to see where that’s being used. Open iT doesn’t care whether it’s shadow IT or not or whether it’s part of the wider or core IT infrastructure, it’ll just give you the information and by bringing that in and knowing what’s happening and bringing it you know into the fold can lead to significant cost savings, not least in license value but also in support costs, administration, cyber security risks, all that kind of good stuff.

[18:10] Removing outdated practices is of course super important. Moving from spreadsheets to a proper SAM Pro database is crucial. We partner with ServiceNow who are obviously ideal and a market leader when it comes to an asset portfolio management system. Having a steering committee or a project board can really help to push through some of these changes or to make those decisions or to make those harvesting policies really work for you. And you need to gather them, and this is a little bit of a black art perhaps, to find the right people in an organization that can help you. You want product owners, people who know about the particular suites of applications across your organization, who owns the budget, service owners, who’s supporting them, some business experts who really use the software across a range of business areas. Procurement valuable as well. Procurement will be able to advise you about what’s happening with the contracts because if you’re locked into a three-year contract, you may not be able to change it. You want to re-prioritize but you can’t really make changes to it. So all the good data in the world is not going to help you until your three years are up and you can make those changes. But if you’re quickly approaching a change of contract, you don’t want to miss that. You really do not want to miss that window of opportunity and procurement are vital in advising you that, along with core asset teams who manage assets across your organization.

[19:44] What do you want your project board to do? Help you with prioritization. Again, when your contracts are approaching renewal is vital. They’ll give you a certain amount of authority. It’s not just you saying you should harvest this application, the project board agrees. It gives you an audit trail of decisions that you’ve made and a justification to go forward with changes, optimization, and managed service.

[20:09] When it comes to managing managed application licenses like the harvesting that I mentioned, taking licenses away and putting them back to the pool, that obviously requires a sensitive communication policy. First thing, identify your biggest risk areas. Communicate to them. Try and seek to understand where their pain points could be. You want to engage not only them but their management and explain the benefits of why it is that you’re doing it. One of the examples of an area I’ve seen where this has been crucial is that in the oil and gas industry, like many industries, it’s 24/7. You’ve got safety risks. You’ve got high-profile industrial processes happening, drilling offshore or onshore, that’s being monitored remotely by some of these sophisticated applications. Understandably, those users have a legitimate need to be logged in all day, all week, but may only check in. And when they do check in, they need to have their information right there at their fingertips. So, having an idle license is absolutely part of their job. And they would have a concern that, oh, I can’t do my work. I can’t take a phone call from the rig offshore because I can’t get a license or I can’t get my application to run. Entirely legitimate. So you need to make sure you’ve tested that crucial pain point and then communicate to them that that’s not going to happen and test that it’s not going to happen.

[21:42] Actually on that point and I think this is something that’s slightly counterintuitive but crucial in that when you first say to users, “Oh, we’re going to take your licenses away and we’re going to give them to somebody else.” They go, “Oh, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be part of that club.” But when you say the license has only been borrowed and you can get it back anytime that you want and you can leave your setup as you had it and walk away. But when you go back to your desk, it’s always going to be available to you. You’re not going to be a bad citizen. Your boss isn’t going to be giving you a hard time for hogging licenses. You’re actually going to be a good user. Your application will be open but you’re not using it and somebody else is getting the benefit. But when you do need it, it’s there for you. It’s actually very freeing and we’ve actually found that users really like it because they’re going, “Hey, I like this. I’m not going to annoy my colleagues. I’m actually going to be popular here and my boss is going to be happy and I’m going to save money.” So, it’s counterintuitive that if you communicate it correctly, articulate the benefit, users actually like it. They don’t find it threatening at all.

[23:00] So in conclusion, really solid data is what you need for smart business decisions. You know, prioritizing, going after the right targets, communicating it and getting your users on board is crucial. Getting those stakeholders on board before you make those changes, building trust with them, having demonstrably good data and knowing who the top users are will help you with that quality information and help you get them on side and help you get the best results.

[23:37] So that is as much as I wanted to go through with the presentation. Thank you very much. So, I’ll hand back to Mae and ask if there’s any questions.

[23:51] Mae: Thank you so much, David, for that very insightful presentation. And of course, we’ve got some great questions lined up. So, let’s get right into the Q&A.

[24:01] Question: What are trends in denials with the license harvesting within the typical workday? Do folks come back from meetings and then they are the one without access?

[24:15] David: So yeah, it’s really interesting to look at times of day and denials. The peak time is actually, on an annual basis, late spring and then another peak in late summer or early August. It’s like when the most people are in the office and least people are on vacation. It’s typically a Wednesday or a Thursday afternoon. If you’re in a global organization, it’s going to be somewhere transatlantic when Europe is still online and America hasn’t come online. That’s a generalization, but you can often find you’re managing your whole licensing situation based on two peaks on a Thursday afternoon in May and in September. So, you have to be very mindful of that. Yes, meetings coming back and forth can be an issue and you absolutely don’t want the situation where users are getting denials. So you do need to be cognizant that you might hit denials at those crucial periods. But with good information, you might also want to ask yourself the question, do I want to have carry capacity all year round for a peak or a denial for two periods throughout a year? There’s no wrong or right answer to that. But if you’re aware of the information and you know when the denials are, also when you look at denials, this is a crucial point and Open iT will tell you this, is that you might see a peak in denials, but you want to make sure is it the same user denying it lots of times or are you genuinely denying a group of users lack of functionality. So based on those two things, you can then make a decision of whether you want to pay attention to your denials by increasing your capacity or you want to work with your users so those denials don’t happen at those crucial points, which you may well be able to predict when those crucial points are going to be because you’ve got good data. But great question. Thank you.

[26:15] Question: How do you decide thresholds for inactivity or true idle versus seasonal or project-based lulls?

[26:27] David: Excellent question. So, I’ve seen windows of denial time from anything from 4 hours. So, 4 hours is a morning unit or an afternoon unit of usage and that’s fairly relaxed. You know, somebody can leave it for 4 hours, but I’ve also seen much more aggressive like 30 minutes. And I would always advise you start with a big window. And there’s also two criteria there. Because you have level two and three, you can set your criteria of when you want to report inactive time really low. So you can ask it, I want to know inactive time at 30 minutes. But you might choose to do the managed or the harvesting at 2 hours. And that’s maybe a good compromise, is that you’re starting to understand your inactive versus active usage at a low threshold, but then you have it a little bit more looser when you’re at the actual harvesting. And then you can bring that down so they match up once you’re confident that everything is working well and you can get that real efficient functionality.

[27:35] Mae: Thank you, David. And that wraps up our Q&A session. Thank you for those insightful and thoughtful responses. Thanks again, David, for this webinar and thank you to everyone who joined us today. This webinar is recorded and a link will be sent to your email shortly. You can also watch our recent webinars: “Is it time to switch to user-based licensing?” and “Idle No More: Reclaiming and Reallocating Underused Licenses.” Scan the QR code on your screen or go to openit.com then resources then webinars on demand. We’re also offering a free 30-minute consultation with an Open iT business solutions consultant if you’re ready to explore license optimization in your environment. Get in touch using the contact details on your screen and follow us at Open iT, Inc. on social media to stay updated. Once again, I’m Mae, your host for today. Thank you and stay safe.

[28:40] David: Thanks everybody.