IT asset management is an issue which is garnering more focus, as IT departments grapple with the need to build an inventory of equipment and try and control costs as best as they can.
Lance Osborne, a senior consultant of product marketing at vendor Dell, said that CIOs and IT managers were facing the problem of having had no asset management process in the past.
"They are faced with an infrastructure of hardware, operating systems, networks, databases, and applications that are almost completely undocumented," Osborne said. "They cannot answer questions such as 'which systems are running which version of the OS and applications?', 'how old are your systems?' or 'how many desktops do you have out there?'"
According to Osborne, this lack of documentation can make it difficult for organisations to both manage IT assets, and also plan for inevitable changes or upgrades.
"It can be a very intimidating situation, especially for medium to large IT departments," he said.
Manual systems, which were prone to error and time-consuming, were another issue Osborne had come across. He advised automating the process to ensure greater accuracy and reduce total cost of ownership.
"The primary benefit of having an automated and thorough system for managing all of a company's assets is a reduction in cost," Osborne said. "The reduction in costs is achieved by increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of planning, purchasing and implementation phases for hardware, OS, networks, databases and applications".
