Last blog I talked about CMDB and its relationship to overall Service Level Management. What about is relationship to ITAM and Asset Management?
Oftentimes enterprises believe that if they have an asset management database, they also have a CMDB database. There is a fundamental difference and an important link.
IT Asset Management is the discipline of managing finances, contracts and usage of IT assets throughout their lifecycles for the purpose of maintaining an optimal balance between business service requirements, total costs, budget predictability and contractual and regulatory compliance. ITAM activities include the management of inventory, software licenses, vendors, procurement, leases, warranties, cost accounting, retirement and disposal.
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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.
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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?
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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.
- They’re pretty mature, and there are plenty of good tools available
- The “out of the box” datasets that are available will cover a lot of common problems
- 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.
- 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:
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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:
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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
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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-
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Hi Guys-
Happy Thursday! It seems that some key business value of IT considerations are truly expanding beyond IT. As an example, take a look at this featured article on cfo.com magazine about lifecycle IT asset management:
What, Where, and How Much?
New software may help companies understand the true scope and cost of IT infrastructure.
We have a client where the office of the CFO is actually considering being the project sponsor for IT asset management.
Don
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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:
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Several years ago I was negotiating a pretty large project contract with a customer, and the topic of ROI came up. Naturally I launched into a long explanation of the benefits of the project, measured in terms of cost avoidance, better productivity for key personnel, better metrics for decision-making, and continuous improvement. This happened to be a Service Desk project.
The client says “Scott, all of those are nice, but what about hard dollars?” Seeing the confused look on my face, he continued, “Around here, hard dollar ROI is when somebody writes a check to our company.”
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