Wisdom NA 2024 interview: A conversation with Eva Louis about the intricacy of IT and business relationships

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Wisdom NA 2024 interview: A conversation with Eva Louis about the intricacy of IT and business relationships

This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Eva Louis, Software Asset Manager at Salt River Project, the Arizona electric power and water utility company. We are delighted to welcome Eva as an upcoming speaker at Wisdom NA 2024, where she will deliver her talk “A Vision for ITAM The Intricacy of IT & Business Relationships”. According to Eva, “Relationships matter in everything you do, but they are essential and key to finding success in the world of IT Asset Management.”

Building on her 30+ years in SAM and ITAM, Eva will share her tips for influencing ITAM stakeholders – identifying those leadership champions, internal business departments, and key operational management that can help accelerate your SAM/ITAM programme and enable you to meet your goals. Ahead of her talk we had a conversation about her key advice for ITAM professionals when looking to expand their network and build those all-important business relationships.

1. What are your tips for stakeholder management in ITAM?

“It is critical to understand the objectives and outcomes the stakeholders are needing to achieve. Leadership often has roadmaps and priorities, and most activities, projects, and requests will be bumped up against those based on the work different teams are doing. ITAM often gets the better look at activities within an organization and it’s important to stay connected to what leadership is focusing on and where they need valid and measurable information to make solid constructive decisions for technologies based on how an organization is using their existing technologies or planning for new ones and innovations. Being a part of quarterly meetings and department updates, and staff meetings for technology product leaders, architecture teams, and IT leadership is essential to have the communication platforms available to coordinate and collaborate information.”

Cyber Security is one of the top relationships as they can be one of the biggest advocates for ITAM in an organization

Eva Louis, Salt River Project

2. Which relationships should ITAM pros look to develop to help advance their goals?

“Cyber Security is one of the top relationships as they can be one of the biggest advocates for ITAM in an organization. In addition, developing strong relationships with the infrastructure, mobility, and desktop/laptop/workstation teams is critical in managing operations day to day. For process and procedure, aligning with the organizational communication teams, Procurement (IT focused), and Financial Management teams are essential to understanding the best way to work with the organization departments on how they receive, monitor, and manage information related to spend, budgets, and communications overall. Platform teams as well will be important related to the tools and accesses any ITAM team needs to understand the environment and landscape of technologies ongoing.”

3. What is your approach to building meaningful business relationships?

“Number one is listening to the internal customers and management to understand their objectives and outcomes. Getting the right requirements means understanding what it takes for the different areas to do their work and being able to make constructive decisions that will enable their workflows to evolve and develop is a key item to rolling out an effective ITAM program, but this is also one of the most difficult. Often companies will throw tools in place thinking that will solve the problem. ITAM teams need to work with IT and businesses to help them see the lifecycles and impacts that affect how they work together with the technologies, so aligning through understanding process and deliverables is a great way to show how you can help customers and management.”

4. What are the most effective relationships you have forged in your career, and why?

“In every organization I’ve worked with the two key departments that have helped advocate and push for the overall organization support have been Cyber Security and Legal departments. Due to compliance and risk management being of utmost importance to the safety and overall security and where the vulnerabilities can impact the bottom line the most, they understand the importance of asset management, contractual obligations, and have protections in place with vendors and outside companies. They won’t be the expert operationally in asset management, but they count on asset management leaders to provide the data necessary for them to do their work effectively. If you want to ensure you are successful in your work to help protect your company by following the laws and policies in place, especially for areas where asset management can be employed, these two areas should always be the top two relationships to have.”

A large part of Eva’s role focuses on developing a holistic and collaborative program with IT, APM, Procurement, and Financial Management for the management and oversight of a software portfolio that includes thousands of applications. Be sure to check out her talk at Wisdom NA 2024!

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