HHS Charts Path to Efficiency Through Software Asset Management

The Department of Health and Human Services’ policy for Software Asset Management is one of the key ways that the agency is meeting legislative and executive mandates to modernize and drive efficiency into IT category management challenges.

The policy addresses a number of legislative authorities that call for agencies to achieve greater category management and IT efficiencies, including the Office of Management and Budget’s Memorandum 16-12, the Making Electronic Government Accountable By Yielding Efficiencies Act — otherwise known as the MEGABYTE Act — and the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act — or FITARA.

These policies call for agencies like HHS to meet various IT compliance responsibilities, and HHS’s SAM centralization policy aims to help meet these mandates, not only in acquisition and IT modernization efforts, but also in driving cost-efficiencies and more secure capabilities.

This policy is in place to formalize HHS SAM “centralization capabilities to reduce IT costs, improve ability to negotiate with IT vendors, minimize risk of software licensing agreement violations, decrease infrastructure cyber-attack vulnerabilities and adopt software management best practices,” the policy says.

The policy will achieve these efficiencies with a variety of activities, which HHS will implement through October 2022. Over these next few years, HHS will more specifically:

• Develop a software management centralization plan
• Identify or appoint a software manager
• Establish a baseline inventory of all commercial software licenses purchased, deployed and in use throughout the agency
• Utilize automated tools to maintain, track and analyze software license inventory data
• Provide relevant HHS personnel Software License Management training
• Comply with OMB and Enterprise Software Category Team reporting requirements
• Incorporate Internal Use Software data into data collection and reporting schedule

A number of offices and officials within HHS will tackle this initiative, including HHS CIO Jose Arrieta — who approved the policy in October — as well as the HHS chief financial officer and enterprise software manager. Offices involved with the policy implementation include the HHS Office of Chief Product Officer, Vendor Management Office, Office of Acquisition Workforce and Strategic Initiatives, and Office of Acquisitions.

The HHS CIO will need to review and reapprove the SAM policy in October 2022 to further extend it.