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Contents 
Introduction
Benefits and implications
The push to centralise
Australian ITIL
AAD sheds light on frozen assets
Executive summary |
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For the surprising proportion of companies that are still using manual inventories and simple Excel spreadsheets to track their desktops, the benefits of an automated platform are significant. Hobsons Bay City Council, which administers 66 square kilometres of coastal land in Melbourne's inner west, found out just how significant after it finally invested in an automated ITAM solution after years of manual updates and tracking using Lotus Notes and a separate reporting database.
| "We're now able to look at a real picture of our IT assets and determine what needs to be upgraded, purchased, changed, or overhauled in the next 12 months." -- Michael Govan, ITAM |
Discovery automatically found and polled desktops, servers, network equipment, and installed software to compile a consistent database of the council's IT assets. Its asset database is refreshed nightly, ensuring that any changes are immediately reflected in management reports that can be generated in minutes instead of hours. "Under the banner of good governance, it is essential that the council looks after its assets," says ITAM manager of information services Michael Govan.
In the past, this was difficult, he concedes. "We relied on people to follow set processes every time, and were probably only achieving 80 percent to 90 percent accuracy. The system was always a little bit hit or miss, and it was always previously a massive overhead from a resources point of view. We're now able to look at a real picture of our IT assets and determine what needs to be upgraded, purchased, changed, or overhauled in the next 12 months."
As Hobsons Bay City Council and countless other organisations have found, introduction of automated IT asset management systems is an epiphanic experience that can deliver immediate improvements in strategies for managing what is typically a considerable but poorly understood asset base.
Unlike conventional fixed assets, IT equipment does not go through a defined lifecycle based primarily on regular maintenance: desktops and servers can be repurposed to extend their life, may deliver different business value depending on the processes they support, and may be underutilised -- a costly waste of resources -- without companies even knowing it.
Losses from poor management can be considerable: Gartner's analysis suggested that inefficient or nonexistent hardware asset management processes could add seven to 10 percent annually to each device's total cost of ownership (TCO). By managing assets closely, however, those costs can be minimised as the infrastructure is restructured around more efficient usage of assets.
Software licence management systems, for example, monitor how often specific applications are used and can point out how many expensive licences are being wasted -- potentially saving big for companies that often buy licences in bulk to attract a discount but end up using just a fraction of what they've paid for.
Monitoring can also guide redeployment and consolidation of assets. For example, some companies are finding many servers are only utilising 10 to 15 percent of their computing capacity and sitting idle the rest of the time. Combining many devices into a single server running multiple virtual machines can eliminate redundant equipment and reduce management costs considerably while ensuring all of a server's computing power is put to good use.
But you can't improve it if you can't measure it. It is for this reason, the broader field of enterprise asset management (EAM) is focused on extending similar efficiencies across the entire organisation. There are generally unrecognised similarities between IT and non-IT assets -- P&E investments typically represent fixed costs, and IT assets have a significant fixed component in the purchase, installation and disposal cost of the equipment.
From this perspective, both types of assets can be effectively managed within the same asset register. However, EAM solutions also need to recognise that IT assets have an even more significant variable component that reflects the ongoing cost of user support, application configuration efficiency, and the system's business value. While P&E assets are simply tracked to ensure maintenance compliance, IT assets can be proactively managed to reduce associated variable expenses.
