I get variations on this question all the time, and the simple answer is NO. In fact, when you start understanding how ITIL relies on the CMDB to support processes and activities, you?ll realize that the disciplines and best practices of ITAM are even more relevant and needed in the ITIL world.

Here’s an example: Service Catalogs. As you know from studying ITIL, the Service Catalog relies (among other things) on Underpinning Contracts (UCs). UCs are, by definition, a contract with an external provider, which usually means that your company is paying the external provider for a service, such as desktop break-fix support. If you’ve ever negotiated for desktop break-fix support, you know that some of the key factors in pricing the contract are:

1. The number of desktops, broken out by manufacturer, model, specifications and their current and future warranty status.
2. Their location(s).
3. The SLAs you want the vendor to meet.

Well, obviously item 3 is related to the Service Catalog and will be a key part of your Underpinning Contract. And equally obvious, items 1 and 2 are plain old traditional IT Asset Management deliverables. So the linkage is the vendor won’t (can’t) give you their best price until they have reliable data for items 1 and 2.

Back in my days working for a large outsourcing provider, we had very sophisticate models for pricing support contracts that accounted for dozens of variables and spit out resource requirements against which we could build a price. Sure, you could still get the contract done without that info - but at a considerably higher expense because the vendor will have to either perform an inventory or compensate for the risk by pricing higher.

By the way, this model applies equally to telecom pricing, server maintenance, application outsourcing or hosting? the list goes on. In fact, one of the big reasons our clients are building CMDBs is to support smarter data center management or to prepare for a large consolidation or outsourcing of their data center.

So when your CIO/CFO/CEO starts looking for ways to reduce costs, will you have the data to show, clearly, the exact relationship between cost and available SLAs?

Also, check out our new White Paper on “How To Develop a Service Catalog”.

Keep up the good work,
Scott Braden

Technorati Tags: itil software

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I’ll be presenting two tracks at the IT Financial Management Association’s IT Asset Management conference in Orlando, June 12-16.

Yep, I somehow signed myself up for TWO tracks:

Monday June 12:
IT Asset Management Disciplines and Techniques Seminar (4 hours)

Designing and Implementing Asset Management Policies and Procedures. Enterprise ITAM can yield enormous benefits - both direct financial benefits and indirect efficiency improvements throughout all areas of IT operations. But many organizations fail to realize the full gains because of challenges with user adoption of new policies and procedures that can actually be used to deliver real benefits. In this session you?ll review case studies of implementations, dissect the good, bad and ugly, and learn lessons for your own use.

So You Have a Discovery Tool…What Next? You’ve spent a good deal of time and money to install your electronic asset discovery tool. In this session you?ll discover how to get accurate data, analyze the information, reconcile with purchase records, and manage your day-to-day license compliance. This session addresses software asset management benchmarking issues.

Top Ways to Save Money in Software Contract Negotiations. In many organizations, software license costs are one of the largest budget line items year after year. Discover the top ways that any organization can reduce software licensing costs without giving up the products and functionality you need. This session addresses software contract negotiation issues.

Software Audits: What’s Your Risk, and Why Should You Act Now? With flat IT budgets and spending in North America, software vendors are increasingly turning to compliance audits as a revenue source. Learn why your risk of audit is increasing - even if you are 100% compliant. Find out why you should act now to manage the risk of software compliance audits, and what you should do when the auditors contact you. This session addresses software audit and compliance issues.

Wednesday, June 14:
How to Build and Manage Best Practices in Asset Acquisition and Procurement Inventory Control
This session reviews best practices we?ve seen and helped implement in managing assets from inception of the procurement cycle through acquisition, installation, management and retirement. If you’re looking for a quick, single-source review of the complete ?asset lifecycle best practices? this will be a good session for you.

Hope to see you there - and send any questions you might have!

Also, check out our new White Paper on “How to Develop an Asset Management Program”.

Thanks,
Scott

Technorati Tags: software asset inventory fixed asset pc audit license audit it audit inventory control helpdesk fixed assets itil license compliance

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Why e-mail when you can wiki?

Whenever we have an ITAM conversation these days, it’s in the context of ITIL… and since ITIL is primarily a service framework, it leads into the integration of asset, service and change disciplines.

Just last week a customer, service desk manager, quizzed us about whether and how to use a knowledge base product that they own but haven’t implemented.

Here’s my take on traditional KM products for ITSM - meaning, the kinds of tools that come with or are sold with help desk tools, so you can track common problems and build a reference knowledgebase.

1. They’re pretty mature, and there are plenty of good tools available
2. The “out of the box” datasets that are available will cover a lot of common problems
3. The really hard (expensive/laborious/tedious/unrealistic) part for most customers comes when they realize that it’s their custom apps and unique problems that most need a KB, and someone has to manually create and review that info.
4. That’s where the discipline breaks down and you get a “half-done” implementation.

Now, here comes a new idea - Wiki’s. If you haven’t heard of it, check out www.wikipedia.com. The basic idea is a web-based, user editable encyclopedia.

So let’s apply this to an IT shop:

1. You can open the content to everyone from end users to developers.
2. It’s a true collaborative model: everybody gets to comment, even _edit_ the entries. Of course for sensitive info you’ll want some controls.
3. The Service Desk agents have a quick, keyword-based way to look up common problems that are specific to their environment.
4. 2nd, 3rd level and management can share info like code comments, even change information - the structure of a wiki is so open that you can take it almost any direction. A wiki could be a faster/easier/more effective way to track this info.
5. In general, you could use a wiki to be the catch-all respository of unstructured info that would otherwise stay locked in the various silo’s of help desk, change, app dev, user communications, etc.

Here’s a great quote from the article:
“You’re fostering greater transparency and a culture of working openly,” said Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext. “It helps break down false silos and provide more shared knowledge that people can build on. With a wiki, you’re sharing control over a resource that anyone can edit. That shared control over time actually fosters trust. That’s one of the intangibles of value inside the enterprise. But imagine what it might mean between trading partners.”

Now, the downsides:

1. It’s open source. You may have policy roadblocks for that. You may also need new skills and of course you’ll need labor time to set up the technical implementation.
2. You’ll need an evangelist, maybe several - maybe one for each major silo in your IT shop, plus one or more for your customers. And of course like any project / application rollout, you might want a full project / change / adoption plan.
3. It’s not as structured as some of your silo tools (a help desk KB or a code library for example). Your pilot testing might end up telling you that you’re needlessly duplicating data or effort.
4. It’s not as mature as the silo tools - security and controls for example might not be where you need them.

My advice? Start small and simple, do it as a pilot test with a defined user group, learn some lessons and gradually scale up.

Scott Braden

Technorati Tags: asset management software asset manager software license fixed asset manage configuration management itil asset software audit standardinternal audit project management

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We all know that getting an ITIL project off the ground is difficult to say the least. Key to making anything happen is, of course, senior management sponsorship and support (in terms of time and dollars). A significant trend we feel worth noting is that we see an ITIL approach where the primary focus is on an integrated Change and Configuration Management (CCM) Solution is the most successful in terms of securing support and funding. Why? Well, a number of factors play in but it basically comes down to the fact that the value proposition associated with an integrated CCM approach is believable and easy to understand.

For Senior Management to support (thus attaching their name to) a project, the value must be easy for them to understand and easy for them to explain to their peers and executives. In addition, the project must make good business sense and hopefully appeal (provide value) to a wide audience. What we are seeing is that Change and Configuration Management, more than any of the other ITIL processes, meets these objectives and is being recognized by Senior Management as being a worthy endeavor.

In short, the value of an integrated Change and Configuration Management (CCM) system lies in understanding the value of knowing and effectively controlling key components of your IT environment. If you can manage your IT environment better through a CMM approach, you can achieve benefits such as:

• Improve your planning and budgeting effectiveness
• Better management of corporate and organization risk
• Ensure security requirements are followed/enforced
• Meet audit and compliance requirements
• Reduce the number of self-inflicted problems
• Reduce waste and redundancy
• Identify trends and patterns to improve service
• Improve services through more consistent, reliable outcomes

the list goes on??..

What?s more important is that it is a relatively straightforward discussion to explain how better CCM processes can achieve these benefits. It is logical, it makes sense, it?s easy to explain, and most important of all, it seems like something the organization should do. The same can not be said of several other of the ITIL processes because they are either poorly understood or the benefits are more difficult to articulate.

Speaking of benefits?who benefits from an effective CCM solution? Well? pretty much everyone inside and outside of IT. From a support and sponsorship perspective, a CCM approach appeals to a wide base of IT constituents because it provides value to a number of different IT departments, including:

• Architecture and Engineering
• Data Center Operations
• Business Continuity and DR
• Applications
• Infrastructure
• Asset Management
• Network Operations
• Client Services

The bottom line here is if you want to get your ITIL project off the ground, you have to focus and sell it in a way that Senior Management can buy in. Give them an approach that makes sense, gives them confidence in a successful outcome, and is something they can easily articulate to the rest of the organization, and you will have a funded project! Chances are, if you focus on Change and Configuration Management as your end, you will find the support you are looking for.

Part 2 - Who’s the boss?

Also, don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar and learn how to Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

Technorati Tags: configuration management itil

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In September, Evergreen exhibited at the Gartner Group’s annual IT & Software Asset Management show. This year, the show was held in LA and pulled about 850 attendees. Consistent with what we’re seeing, there is a rising interest in ITAM as a means to drive cost savings in IT organizations. As part of our presence at the event, we conducted a benchmark assessment with about 140 attendees and asked questions related to:

• Their degree of commitment and focus on enterprise IT asset management
• Their current operational maturity levels
• The extent that their ITAM programs are actually being leveraged for business benefit
• Determine their understanding of, and alignment with, a Configuration Management Database “CMDB” strategy

Among the most significant findings:

• We found that many advanced ITAM programs are experiencing mixed results in using the ITAM data to deliver value to the business.
• We also found that a significant number, more than one-third, are still struggling with managing more than seven different asset repositories, making a common approach to the management and use of the data virtually impossible.
• There is a strong commitment (52 percent) to building an enterprise-wide CMDB, but the survey data suggest that there is very limited understanding among respondents about what an active CMDB requires.

You can find the survey results and an in-depth analysis at:

2005 IT Asset Management (ITAM) Benchmark Assessment: Many ITAM Programs at Risk of Failure to Deliver Business Value

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Technorati Tags: asset manager itil configuration management configuration management configuration management database asset tracking

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Old cliche: “When you’re up to your neck in alligators, it’s easy to forget your goal is to drain the swamp”

The same could be said of an enterprise IT Asset Management project…

There are a lot of alligators between “where we are today” and “saved money and improved compliance.” You’ll recognize them by their large sharp teeth and foul breath:

• sponsorship / budget / relative priority problems
• people / process / buy-in by the stakeholders problems
• tool / technical challenges
• and all the infinite varieties of other little nasty things that can derail your grand plan

So let’s do a quick re-focus: What’s the goal of ITAM? How will you know that your swamp is now drained, and you can get to work on your lovely shopping center or golf course?

Typical answers are things like “save money” and “prove or improve compliance.” Maybe your project charter goes into more detail, including something like “estimated first-year cost avoidance for software licensing of $1.4 million.”

So, to continue stretching my swamp analogy (or is it a metaphor? I always get those confused), how do you prove to your bosses that the swamp is now dry and ready for the bulldozers?

If I may suggest: that, my friend, is your REAL goal: “prove to the boss that we did it successfully, here are the results, and here’s what to do next.”

So here are some ideas on how to do that (HINT: I see many companies that don’t do these… ever)

1. Audit. Sure you built a great system, where robust tools and solid, efficient processes combine smoothly, all of your data is always up-to-date, and any manager anywhere can instantly get the correct useful answer to the questions “what do we have, where is it, what’s been happening to it, and how much has all of that cost so far?”

Right? Well… prove it. Get with your corporate audit team and start checking the actual data. Follow audit standards and issue an audit report. Does your (expensive) ITAM thing actually work? Hint… if this part makes you blink and say “no way buddy” then maybe we should talk?

2. Reconcile. Here’s a big way to miss out on the ROI - don’t ever reconcile the software and hardware discovery against the asset database information.

I tell you, it’s amazing to me how many companies have a decent set of discovery tools, an adequate ITAM solution… but they NEVER have reconciled the two. Trust me - there are ALWAYS gaps. Usually big ones. Why don’t more people do the reconciliation? Simple - it’s a lot of tedious work. Can’t do it automatically - someone has to look at reports and clear up the discrepancies. But… especially with software licenses - this is where the big money is hiding.

3. Report. Sure, you need to issue detailed reports on items 1 and 2 above, but this often-overlooked deliverable is about “reporting” in general.

Here’s what happens: you do the ITAM project, you work with all the stakeholders, gather requirements, elicit opinions, build a great system, get it up and running, it’s chugging along, capturing and relating all of this great data about assets and costs and labor and service… and nobody ever looks at it. Opportunities pass by because nobody knows about them.

Instead, you should have a continuous improvement program, with all of your stakeholders. Asking (and getting answers to) questions like: “what are our actual metrics vs SLA’s?” “how much have we spent year-to-date on this type of asset, versus last year?” “what percentage of our pc’s had hard disk failures?” ” how long does it take to get a new hire fully operational?” and so on.

4. Act on the information. USE THE DATA… that’s why you paid all the money for ITAM in the first place!

Change your vendors because the evidence supports it - not because Susie is a cuter sales rep than Jim.

Get your extra headcount approved because you can PROVE that it will improve the company’s ability to open new stores faster - not because “we’re really busy and need more help.”

Tell the CFO “don’t worry about software audits because we audit our compliance every quarter and we always come out with less than 5% error” - not “don’t worry about audits, we’re pretty sure we’re ok.”

Do you get my drift? Ok? Great… go DO IT.

till next time

Scott Braden

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Hello-

September was a busy tradeshow month, attending both the Gartner ITAM (IT Asset Management) conference in LA, as well as the ITSMF annual conference in Chicago.

Here is one theme I found at the ITAM conference-

Industry interest in ITAM remains only moderate, which I believe is partly a result of the challenge many face in building the business case for IT Asset Management, and getting a corporate commitment for the single source (read virtual-federated) of the truth that underpins this.

Why is a great question to answer sufficiently before asking What. Why should we invest in developing an enterprise IT asset repository? The best answer is–because we can show its worth doing so–financially AND strategically. If this is a challenge you face, here are some of the hard, ROI defensible business value areas in ITAM where you can dig for business value.

Software, hardware, and leasing vendor management and reconciliation.

Most organizations do not manage these effectively, and there are still millions of dollars in savings available in most big companies?in distributed assets AND the data centers. In one session I attended, the Gartner analyst asked, “How many organizations here regularly reconcile software licenses, and use the data actively in vendor management?” Less than 20% of the audience raised their hands.

Outsourced vendor activities.

Any seat management, quantity, or activity based outsource needs regular true up. I know of one Fortune 1000 manufacturer that was paying for support of 6000 PCs, and had only 4800 employees. Ultimately they found they only needed 4200 PCs. They saved millions annually, and were able to reduce IT by 25 folks with no service quality degradation (who could imagine they didn?t realize they were inefficient?).

Analysis of actual software usage.
It gets harder here, but you can get meaningful data on who actually uses the assets they are assigned, pointing to a need smaller than the current spend rate.

Better capital planning, and the ability to understand the baseline infrastructure of the organization.

True understanding empowers better alignment and budget actions aimed at a simplified enterprise architecture (EA). What is the point of having an enterprise architecture for simplification and commonality if you don’t move toward it? Better data on true total costs of unnecessary complexity drives executives to allow only critical deviations from established standards. Look here for degree of compliance with EA, justification for deviation, and calculate the cost of deviation in skills management, specialized process, vendor management, platform diversity, and complexity added.

The number of discrete IT asset repositories in use across IT.

For most large organizations, they recognize between 10 and 20 operational repositories on IT asset data, buried in the silos of IT. Often, in taking a deeper look, we find an equal number of undocumented repositories. What does it cost to administer these repositories? How manual are they? How are new assets added, updated, and retired? How often are they duplicating data maintained in another asset repository? It?s a good bet this is all manual. Could total labor for these activities be reduced by 60-80% in a centralized model? How do these various and inconsistent repositories contribute to change failures? What is the cost of these failures? What is the cost of near misses for failure? What is the impact on IT efficiency for processing work with a dozen sources of data? What is the degree of emergency reactivity, and the cost of that reactivity? This is a terrific area to dig for return, and can be quantified for hard ROI.

That?s more than enough for one Blog. Next week we?ll look at the linkage between ITAM and the CMDB. Thanks for tuning in!

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I’ve heard it said that most arguments are more about definitions than actual disagreements. Seems we all have the habit of hearing or reading the same words, and interpreting them in our unique way.

For example, here’s a term you hear a lot, but rarely hear defined: “Best Practices.” What’s that mean, anyway?

So I spent about 30 seconds with Google, looking at various definitions, and came up with these common themes:

• a well-defined method
• proven successful
• generic / transferable
• mature

And there are lots of others, but I think you can boil down to these.

Even these broad, vague definitions only prompt more questions:

• a well-defined method (By whom? Toward what objectives or goals?)
• proven successful (Where? By whom? Under what conditions?)
• generic / transfereable (Enough that they apply to everyone? At what level of detail?)
• Mature (How do we know?)

How does a “best practice” come to exist? Survey? Academic study? Experience and industry consensus? A consultant spouts an opinion?

How do you validate that it’s a “best practice” versus “some consultant’s opinion” vs “it’s how we do it here, and it works ok?

Honestly… I don’t know. If you do - shoot me comment, ok?

Nevertheless, we are charged with implementing ITAM Best Practices. So I guess we better be able to define what that means…

So… here goes - got your flamethrowers ready?

1. Centralized ITAM Program
2. Corporate Standards
3. Centralized Request System
4. Centralized Procurement Function
5. Centralized Asset Repository
6. Integrated Asset, Change, Incident Environment
7. Service Level Agreements: Internal, Customer, Vendor
8. Lifecycle Asset Mgmt. defined from Conception to Grave view of asset lifecycle
9. Inventory Mgmt. combination of Discovery & Physical Inventory (Audit Loop)
10. Designated Asset Managers
11. Phased Implementation, Prioritized by Business Need and Organized / Managed / Concluded by following a formalized Project Mgmt. Methodology
12. Repeatable, Measurable, Documented Process
13. Compliance included as integral part of process design
14. Ongoing Operational Program Management

Ok, I have suited up in my big silver flame-retardant Nomex suit… I’m sure you disagree with some or all of the above… send me a comment and let me know!

Scott B

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I’ve heard it said that most arguments are more about definitions than actual disagreements. Seems we all have the habit of hearing or reading the same words, and interpreting them in our unique way.

For example, here’s a term you hear a lot, but rarely hear defined: “Best Practices.” What’s that mean, anyway?

So I spent about 30 seconds with Google, looking at various definitions, and came up with these common themes:

• a well-defined method
• proven successful
• generic / transferable
• mature

And there are lots of others, but I think you can boil down to these.

Even these broad, vague definitions only prompt more questions:

• a well-defined method (By whom? Toward what objectives or goals?)
• proven successful (Where? By whom? Under what conditions?)
• generic / transfereable (Enough that they apply to everyone? At what level of detail?)
• Mature (How do we know?)

How does a “best practice” come to exist? Survey? Academic study? Experience and industry consensus? A consultant spouts an opinion?

How do you validate that it’s a “best practice” versus “some consultant’s opinion” vs “it’s how we do it here, and it works ok?

Honestly… I don’t know. If you do - shoot me comment, ok?

Nevertheless, we are charged with implementing ITAM Best Practices. So I guess we better be able to define what that means…

So… here goes - got your flamethrowers ready?

1. Centralized ITAM Program
2. Corporate Standards
3. Centralized Request System
4. Centralized Procurement Function
5. Centralized Asset Repository
6. Integrated Asset, Change, Incident Environment
7. Service Level Agreements: Internal, Customer, Vendor
8. Lifecycle Asset Mgmt. defined from Conception to Grave view of asset lifecycle
9. Inventory Mgmt. combination of Discovery & Physical Inventory (Audit Loop)
10. Designated Asset Managers
11. Phased Implementation, Prioritized by Business Need and Organized / Managed / Concluded by following a formalized Project Mgmt. Methodology
12. Repeatable, Measurable, Documented Process
13. Compliance included as integral part of process design
14. Ongoing Operational Program Management

Ok, I have suited up in my big silver flame-retardant Nomex suit… I’m sure you disagree with some or all of the above… send me a comment and let me know!

Scott B

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