Bob Benson
Tom Bugnitz
It's not unusual for those in the IT profession to take clear concepts and make them completely vague and less than understandable -- often to the point of making the concept unusable. Asset management is one of these concepts, discovered Cutter Senior Consultants Bob Benson and Tom Bugnitz while recently assisting one organization to establish a roadmap to asset management.
Without definitive statements as to what asset management is, an organization can never actually do asset management. To remedy this situation, Benson and Bugnitz offer these definitions:
Asset management is about assets. These are things we buy or make. They have costs, location, utilization, performance, maintenance/upgrades/replacements, current value and condition, risks, compatibility. They have a lifecycle. In practical terms, asset management most often covers infrastructure components and applications.
Asset management has two value propositions. 1) Asset tracking -- supports the day-to-day operations of the IT organization, including procurement, maintenance, help desk support, and pricing/charging. 2) Asset assessment and management -- assists IT management in making planning and management decisions about the collection of assets, including assessment of cost, performance, service level and quality, risks, and alignment to business and IT strategy.
Asset management comprises data and processes. 1) database(s), 2) the routine processes to update and maintain the database(s), and 3) the routine management processes for the use of the data (i.e., carrying out the two value propositions).
Asset management is about the "truth" about assets. Therein lies the critical problem; data about assets degrades through time, like rust. Assets change, disappear, are used differently, and so on. Keeping the data up to date is difficult: think decentralized procurement, decentralized upgrades and updates, and renewals.
For most companies, the greatest, and most quickly demonstrable, value of asset management comes from obtaining initial data to enable making management decisions about the collection of assets -- the second value proposition stated above. Says Benson, "In this, absolute accuracy is not required, but the learning curve is immense. The data informs management about the scope of assets, the value in keeping track, and the intricacy of processes needed to keep it up. Think of the ties to procurement, maintenance, budgets, capital budgets, projects that add/modify assets, and ITIL processes."
To schedule an interview with Bob Benson or Tom Bugnitz, contact Kim Leonard at kleonard@cutter.com or +1 781 641 5111.