Field notes
A running log of what's actually broken in enterprise software decisions, and what we're learning fixing it. Written from the inside of live procurement work.
Software rationalisation drags on for months not because the analysis is hard, but because every question needs a human to answer it.
Read →A SAM tool tracks what's installed. It doesn't see what's subscribed. So when procurement asks 'what can we use instead of DocuSign?', the catalogue can't help.
Read →Forty requests a month. Three weeks of analysis each time. And by the time the recommendation arrives, the decision has already been made in the corridor.
Read →When three regions each own a version of the same tool, the consolidation case never closes before the renewal does.
Read →By the time a vendor-driven software request reaches governance, twelve people are invested, one partner has written to the CIO, and building the case against it takes four weeks.
Read →Enterprise governance committees fail not because the process is broken, but because no system tells them what the software they already own actually does.
Read →Six people, fifty-five queries, two million pounds blocked in a single month. What point-of-decision governance looks like when it works.
Read →When new leadership asks for a cost-reduction forecast, the honest answer is often that the data was never built for it.
Read →Inside the enterprise where two questions about a software tool needed a hundred people and a week to answer properly.
Read →Partial estate data does not just limit the analysis. It actively misdirects it.
Read →Software estates don't get messy because companies are careless. The information gap between what you own and what each tool actually does is simply too large to bridge manually.
Read →Your SAM tool finds what it can install. SaaS lives in a browser, and the scanner never sees it.
Read →A construction company ran a proper rationalisation programme, four months, external consultants, and saved sixty thousand pounds from a ten-million-pound estate. The number is not the story. The reason is.
Read →Five SAM platforms, months of contractor work, and still no answer to whether two tools do the same thing. That is not a data problem.
Read →When a business unit arrives with a vendor demo and total conviction, your governance team needs more than a spreadsheet to win the argument.
Read →Fifteen approvers on a software renewal is not governance. It is a bottleneck with a governance label on it.
Read →Why one-time audits document software waste but can't prevent the next duplicate purchase.
Read →When the estate is split across workstreams, the answer to 'do we already own this?' is never a definitive yes or no.
Read →When an acquisition closes, the software comes with it. Nobody has the intelligence to act on it, so nobody does.
Read →A sound business case made two years ago is still driving today's renewal, because nobody has a mechanism to check whether the market has moved.
Read →Fifty-nine consolidation opportunities. Six held up. What the gap between those numbers reveals about the missing layer in every software estate.
Read →Good software decisions can still cost you money. The ones approved correctly, two years ago, with no way to prove the alternative existed.
Read →Enterprises are not buying software carelessly. They are buying it without the intelligence to prove they already own it.
Read →Requesters spend weeks learning a tool before they submit a request. Reviewers get it on a Tuesday and are expected to evaluate it by Thursday. That gap is why software overlap compounds.
Read →SAM tools track everything you own. They can’t tell you what to do with it. That’s the gap Samplify closes.
Read →Why software rationalisation stalls on opinion rather than evidence, and what it takes to resolve the argument before the renewal date arrives.
Read →The catalogue tells you what you own. The decision layer tells you what to do about it.
Read →M&A activity and restructurings don't freeze software spend. They remove the people who would question it.
Read →Four hours per software request is not inefficiency. It is the correct amount of effort for the tools available. Here is what the decision layer changes.
Read →When two companies merge, SAM tools can tell you what you own. The question of what any of it actually does, at a feature level, remains unanswered for months.
Read →The gap between what your catalogue records and what your estate can do at a feature level is where duplicate software spend hides.
Read →Most software governance processes give the appearance of control without the information infrastructure to actually exercise it.
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