Tiered SAM Certification (TSS) now in preview
15 February 2011
In a major step forward for the industry, recent developments in the ISO/IEC 19770 SAM standard provide a tiered approach to the adoption of best practice standards; this important development enables companies to phase their adoption of SAM in line with business priorities and ensures the standard develops best in class practices in a way that meets real market needs
The ISO/IEC Standard for Software Asset Management was published in Many 2006 and was the first standard available to customers globally. The standard was designed to align to the existing Service Management Standard ISO/IEC 20000-1. The standard covers all SAM process areas: corporate governance, planning, approval, core SAM integration, management and maintenance.
Although ISO/IEC 19770-1 was well received from customers, SAM Practitioners and software vendors, feedback from customers was that it was overwhelming and would take too much time and investment to implement in order to certify.
To address this issue - Working Group 21, the committee responsible for the development of SAM Standards, are revising the standard into a tiered approach (see Fig.1) Customers will be able to assessed at each milestone. This is a far more pragmatic approach to adopting Software Asset Management. So for instance if a customer primary goal is to be able to demonstrate repeatable software licensing compliance then by conforming to Tier 1 this will be achievable. For more information about the work on the tiered approach to conformance the group website can be found at
http://www.stagedsam.org/