@JuliaV, we may be in a similar situation because I am at a higher ed institution and operate under some of the same constraints you mentioned, though not all. Establishing different service levels, with some being cost recovered, is a work in progress for us. We’ve talked about having both product-based and department-based recharge models.
For example, at the product level, our SAM team manages software products at a certain threshold that can be considered “common good” to the organization; that is, software titles that are used broadly across the organization. We also manage additional uncommon but strategically significant products (these are not necessarily at the same cost threshold).
Our baseline services for such “common good” products would be: Vendor management; procurement (with SAM owning the budget for the software product); contract management; managing access to and distribution of the software; product lifecycle management; and reporting to leadership (which includes justifying the software and recommendations on changes to the contract & product levels/mix).
A lower service level is “purchase consolidation”, where SAM is used as an intermediary to consolidate the purchase on behalf of various departments. This is used for products that are not universally used, and not strategically significant to the entire organization. In that case SAM’s services are very similar to the above, with the exception of the lifecycle management and reporting features, and SAM does not hold the budget for the product. SAM also does not determine who is allowed to access the software, because that is determined by the department stakeholders/funders. SAM does provide some level of access to our SAM enterprise tool for self-service: Departmental IT can run their own usage reports, and we provide basic training for the tool.
We also have a cost recovery model, where SAM provides value by purchasing at large quantities and then centrally recharging for each individual license. SAM absorbs the risks of the purchase levels and has more flexibility to determine product levels. Services for cost recovery products are: Vendor management; procurement (with SAM owning the budget); contract management; managing access to and distribution of the software; and limited product lifecycle management. Limited reporting, and access to the product is controlled by which individuals pay. The costs of the administration, charging for, and distributing the product are wrapped into the rate that we internally charge for a software license. Of course, we must have a proper threshold and expected revenue before we take on the cost recovery model.
But there are some products that are not as commonly used, not strategically significant, where the people who use the product realize they could use SAM resources to better manage the product. With our limited capacity, we can’t engage deeply in every product, but if a department or consortium of departments sees value to them where they would pay us to bump the service level up from the “purchase consolidation” to “common good” service level. It may also involve direct management/reporting of the products via the SAM enterprise tool - basically a higher level of support there. That is where we have not fully fleshed out what the cost model might be.
Also for the cost recovery model, we have a straightforward way of calculating the costs and determining the recharge rate, but so far that hasn’t been used by departments themselves, as it increases the per-license cost significantly and is only really cost effective with a very large internal customer base.
