Author Henry Miller was ahead of his time when he said
that in life's ledger, there is no such thing as frozen
assets.
When he wrote that in 1956, the few companies that had computers
knew exactly where they were - in a warehouse somewhere, surrounded
by a horde of operators constantly replacing valves. These days, of
course, computers, software and network components flow throughout
organisations like water, filling every vacant space, changing
regularly, propelled by a fast-moving current. How do you keep
track of it all, and what drives a company to do so?
One of the most obvious drivers for an asset management system
is cost reduction. Knowing exactly what hardware and software is
installed on the network can save helpdesk staff valuable time in
helping to resolve a problem. It can also enable you to tally your
actual inventory against supplier invoices, for example.
"The things that users should be looking to achieve from their
asset management are things like discovering invoicing errors,
reusing their assets more effectively and reduction of software
spend by reharvesting licences where appropriate," says Jonathan
Price, consulting manager at IT management software supplier
CA.
You can also use an IT inventory for other tasks such as
identifying under-used assets (does the marketing manager really
ever use that scanner?) and identifying asset theft (just where did
that 512Mbytes of Ram go?).
But there are other reasons for building a proper IT inventory.
Mark Nutt, divisional director of technology solutions at systems
integrator Morse, identifies security as one issue. Knowing what is
on your network makes it easier to protect.
The other reason is licensing compliance. A good IT inventory
can help you ensure that, should the auditors come knocking, you
will have evidence to support your claims that you are using fully
licensed software. And it can sometimes bring unexpected
windfalls.
Paul Fairhurst, infrastructure manager at Wigan Borough Council,
installed the Activesam asset management tool from Monactive in
August. "We found that we were 20% over-licensed for virus
checking," he says. The council thought it needed more licences for
its Sophos software than the 2,150 it had paid for, but in fact it
was only running the software on 1,800 or 1,900 machines. The extra
knowledge saved the council between £5,000 and £6,000.
Still, getting to that point is not as easy as it looks. Several
companies offer tools that enable you to look at your licensing
information and reconcile it against evidence of executables
collected from PCs around the organisation. But because most
licence agreements come in paper form, entering and maintaining
this information can be a huge administrative overhead, warns Mike
Newton, spokesman for the Business Software Alliance, which
represents software suppliers.
"I wish we could wave a wand and make it simple, but we can't,"
he says. "We would encourage people to make use of the multiple
licensing schemes that suppliers offer because that enables you to
lump things together rather than keeping lots of jewel cases lying
around."
Just as the promise of software licence reconciliation requires
more work than you might think, so the other capabilities of asset
management products should be taken with a pinch of salt. For
example, many sales people will tout autodiscovery as a key feature
of asset management tools. The idea is that you turn the software
on, it sniffs around the network and finds all of your devices.
However, it may take more work than that.
Companies with remote locations connecting over virtual private
networks, or connecting periodically via ISDN lines, for example,
could find it difficult to get a clear picture of their network.
For example, when Mark Wiezbicki, IT manager at Southampton
Football Club, installed Microsoft's Systems Asset Manager, he had
to physically visit five locations that connect to the club's
offices using a VPN .
Wiezbicki's team compared the data from the successfully
discovered machines against his Active Directory machine listing to
find those machines that had not been picked up. These included
laptops that were not connected when they ran the software. "They
gave me a bit of software which I installed onto a USB key, and for
individual machines that we had not managed to pick up we collected
the data from that. It was done and dusted in a week and that was
only because it took me time to get out of the office."
Wiezbicki's experience with the software was positive, but would
things go equally smoothly for a retailer with 1,400 branch outlets
connecting via ISDN or VPN over broadband? Most branch offices
might contain one or two PCs - certainly not enough to warrant
installing a separate copy of the asset management software
locally. "If you have a central discovery service then you have a
real problem in that type of configuration, and we would be no
different in that situation," says Ian Dunn, chief executive at
asset management supplier Monactive.
Some companies, Monactive included, solve this problem by either
manually sending out the software agents that install themselves on
a PC to log its specification and assets, or forcing the central
Windows server to download and install the agent on to the desktop
the next time the machine logs on. However, manually sending it out
places the onus on the user to install it, and forcing a download
assumes a suitably configured network and server operating system.
Such issues do not make the problem unsolvable, but they do add
more complexity.
And what about legacy equipment or unsupported platforms, such
as the Macintosh? Monactive's product supports the Mac, but not all
software does. And for retailers, will the asset management
software pick up barcode readers? That is highly unlikely.
The answer, according to Patrick Bolger, chief executive at
service desk and asset management software supplier Hornbill
Systems, is to complement software tools with properly refined
processes. "You need a combination of the two," he says. "There is
no way to shortcut that. If you are going to do asset management or
configuration management, it starts with the procurement
process."
Some tools theoretically reduce the need for effective
procurement processes by finding assets on the network when they
appear, he says, meaning that you could try to discover equipment
after the fact. "But that is managing through chaos," says Bolger.
Better to log equipment and software as it comes into the
organisation and use the discovery to help track its whereabouts,
configuration and use.
A central procurement department that approves and logs all
purchases will go a long way towards making your asset management
system more effective. If you do not have such a department, you
have to improvise, like Wigan Council. Fairhurst's team has had a
relatively loose hold on software purchasing. Departments will
often purchase their own software, making it difficult for the IT
department to track licensing, for example.
"In theory, we have central purchasing of IT, but the
organisation as a whole does not have a central purchasing officer
to enforce everything," he says. "The previous CEO believed in
devolving power and that had many advantages, but there are some
disadvantages."
Consequently, Fairhurst's team is gaining approval for a new
rule which would require all departments to submit licensing
information regarding their software purchases. The IT department
can then correlate these against installed applications found by
the asset management system. Fairhurst is also planning to make the
asset management software's database available to the council's
helpdesk staff to improve problem solving efficiency.
Understanding where the asset management information will be
used in the company is a vital part of the project that should be
assessed at the outset, says Nutt. "Is the company approaching
asset management as part of its enterprise management or service
management strategy, or is it looking at asset management as a
separate project?" he asks. Perhaps finance is getting antsy about
the growth in IT expenditure and wants to pin down the value of the
installed assets, or maybe the service team wants to increase its
throughput.
Price's view is that an asset management system will become a
foundation component to help an organisation become more effective
in IT. Placing asset management within a wider maturity model
linked to broad goals will help customers realise the best value
from it. "We tell customers that discovery of the assets out there
is a necessary step, but it is not the end game," he says.
Examples of how an integrated asset management system could be
used to fulfil corporate goals in subtle, but advanced ways include
supplier comparison. Correlating helpdesk information with an asset
registry could enable you to approach a desktop PC supplier and
tell them that they experienced a greater percentage of hardware
faults per PC then their competitor, for example. Such information
could be useful when negotiating contracts.
Most IT departments face a constant challenge when mapping
strategies that will take them from point A (where they are now) to
point B (where they want to be in the future). But before you
start, it pays to understand exactly what assets you are setting
out with. That should make the journey run more smoothly.
Case study: asset registry gives helpdesk a boost at law
firm
Before IT law firm Taylor Wessing bought in an off-the-shelf
asset management system, it was using a custom Access database,
with limited results. "We did not hold any information other than
the machine name and when the machine was last logged on to, and by
whom," says IT project manager Sharon Mone. That was all the
information the company could log at that time, because anything
more detailed would have caused expensive inefficiencies. "We would
have to visit each PC and do a manual audit on each machine," says
Mone. "When you have 600 machines, that is a lot."
Taylor Wessing needed something more substantial that detected
not only the specification of the machine, but also the software
that was running on it. That would enable helpdesk staff to
understand the environment that someone was working in when they
called the helpdesk with a problem.
Mone was asked to purchase a more effective asset management
system, and chose Assetworks, an asset registry from Hornbill
Systems, which also sold the firm a helpdesk management system. The
company began deploying the software in June, and Mone noticed some
benefits straight away. The software's autodiscovery feature
queries machines on the network, automatically building a database
of their configurations and installed software. Because Taylor
Wessing prohibits the use of certain applications, such as iTunes,
the IT department could find out who had installed illicit software
and address the problem.
The asset registry is also useful when rolling out new software
and hardware, explains Mone, because it enables the IT team to work
out who has the correct drivers installed. But to Mone, one of the
biggest benefits comes in reconciling software licences. Because
the reporting part of the software lets her count the software
installations across the network, she can compare this data against
the supplier licensing contracts that she has signed. "You can see
at a glance what you have, but also the expiry dates as well. You
can see when something is due to expire and when you have to renew
it."
In spite of of the productivity the asset registry offers,
getting it working was not without its hiccups, "People here do not
always log off and reboot their machine, and it is only when they
log in to their machine that the audit starts," Mone says. "People
might not log in for weeks or months, so we would have to force
people to log out and log back in. That is still an issue."
It is a particular problem with mobile users, many of whom are
trainee lawyers on secondment who may not connect laptops to the
network for weeks or months. In this scenario, all that the IT team
can do is take a note of the asset label on the machine (which is
created using an internal naming convention). Clearly, even in the
world of automatic asset registries, some things are still
manual.