Anti-piracy organisation the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has called on IT managers for greater engagement on licensing issues as it tries to emphasise its mediatory and educational roles.

Speaking to IT Week, the BSA's Julie Strawson and Ram Dhaliwal portrayed the organisation as an educator in the area of software asset management (SAM) and called for more feedback on what it could be doing to help IT professionals in this field.

"Our justasksam.com site is getting a good amount of traffic and plays a part in educating firms, and the new ISO standard is also helping," said Strawson. " There seems to be a sea change in attitudes to SAM but IT professionals need to put their hands up and tell us more."

The BSA also released a list of ten tips for firms looking to implement SAM, including the need to appoint a software asset manager, ensuring senior management buy-in and creating a SAM database to store all relevant information.

Centralising purchasing and distribution of software under the IT department, and taking an inventory of current software assets were also listed as key steps.

"If you're a budding IT manager, it's a great way to demonstrate you're optimising the infrastructure by putting in a SAM solution – it's demonstrating the value of IT to the company," argued Dhaliwal. "We see about 30 percent savings when customers do SAM."

Strawson said that they were also working to change the perception of the organisation as primarily an enforcement body, by promoting it as a mediator between software vendors and end users.

"We can understand how customers can be reluctant, if they have a problem with their licensing, to speak directly to the vendors, but they can talk to the BSA, " said Strawson. "They can use us as a conduit."

But Matt Fisher of asset management specialist Centennial Software argued that it will take a long time before the BSA is seen as anything other than an "aggressive enforcer" by firms.

"It's right to engage with the IT community but people have to learn to trust them and see the BSA as an independent body rather than the lapdog of the larger vendors," Fisher added.

Fisher also argued that the BSA would be able to better help end users if they had SAM specialists as members. "It may be isolating itself from the people who can best help them," he said.

Strawson also renewed calls on government to increase the legal penalties for those knowingly engaged in piracy. "Unless the government does this many firms will put it at the bottom of their agenda," she argued.