Most large organisations do not actually know what IT
assets they have or who is looking after them.
However, a proper process of inventory, investigation and
improvement can provide real gains in value and productivity. This
is a theme which regularly emerges at BCS specialist group
meetings.
IT asset management (ITAM) used to mean acquiring hardware and
software. However, most large organisations lose count of their
assets during their life cycle, as devices are spread across sites
and managed by different departments.
According to Gartner, between 40% and 60% of IT operations
budgets are spent on maintaining IT assets. This can only be saved
if you know exactly where everything is and who owns it so a
complete listing is essential management information.
Key inventory information includes exact location data for each
device, model number and serial number (always key for external
support suppliers) and the software version running. This
information is vital in negotiating maintenance contracts and
provides a sound basis for calculating future budgets.
To obtain a full inventory, you may need to invest in the tools
or ask a specialist ITAM service provider to collect asset data for
you. Also, today's complex infrastructures, firewalls and other
segmentation technology may prevent you from discovering all your
assets.
An analysis of your findings will show assets that are close to
or actually beyond their supported life by the suppliers, and those
that have caused the most calls to the help desk.
This may reveal unstable software on the network and other areas
where you can make savings on support.
The analysis can help you to plan where the next round of
investment should be.
Devices that have been troublesome historically are candidates
for replacement, or maybe staff have not been trained how to use
them properly? With software, it is a good idea to profile your
users. Often licence usage can be reduced by between 10% and 20%
simply by categorising users and the applications they use
regularly.
Finally, look at your support service levels. It is important to
marry the business requirements for availability and the time taken
to restore a failed service to the architecture of your system.
For example, for single devices in non-critical areas a spares
holding or next business day replacement often will suffice. But
business critical devices with no resilience need superior
maintenance cover.
Fully evaluating your business needs, regarding support, can
dramatically change the contract you negotiate with external
support suppliers and can save money. Experience shows that
organisations can save between 7% and 27% of their maintenance
budgets simply by reconciling the asset register with their support
contracts.
Support partners will not be lining up to tell you that they
think you have too many assets covered on maintenance.
Most of this is industry best practice and is contained within
the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
IT asset management helps and enables ITIL with incident and
problem management, change management, release management, IT
financial management and capacity management.
Stuart Brown is a services architect with 3net. He is
writing on behalf of the British Computer Society.