Asset Management: Coping with Today and Tomorrow’s Challenges

Featured article by Nancy Van Elsacker, president of TOPdesk

IT leaders face challenges where they are asked to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Next to that they face thorough audits on a lot of compliance and regulatory requirements. Added to that they have to be able to find a strategy to cope with new evolutions and trends, such as the Internet of Things. This makes having a good IT asset management strategy and solution more important than ever.

The importance of asset management lies in its impact on the entire organization.

Throughout the entire asset’s lifecycle, from procurement to disposal, many departments and people are involved. The finance department, for instance, will need asset management capabilities to best understand the use of their resources for proper budgeting; IT and business leaders need the insight to see opportunities for cost reductions; and end users need proper support and will continue to have requests.

IT organizations are in various maturity stages ranging from having no asset registration at all or having multiple data sources — Excel files, tools of suppliers, system management tools, etc. — to having their asset management fully integrated within their service desk processes. In all of the stages, there still is a business case to make around either implementing or improving the asset management.

Business case/advantages

Research by Infotech points out that implementing a good asset management system actually can lead to a reduction of the total IT budget by as much as 5 percent. As an example, by only registering the contracts assiociated to the assets, a big cost reduction can already be accomplished as it enables you to track double contracts, reminds you when to start renegotiating or resigning the contract. Being aware upfront that a contract is up for renewal, obviously puts you in a better position to renegociate. Other clear cost reductions come out of tracking warranty dates and performing inventory controls.

IT leaders all know, and mostly dread, the sometimes very disruptive audits. A good asset management solution will enable you have the information at hand much quicker, not only saving time for getting the necessary information ready, but it also will lead to a more challenging job for the IT professionals, because who likes gathering data for an audit anyway?

Audits are very often a starting point for companies to implement or improve asset management and not only for the above reasons. These audits can bring up security risks within the IT organization that have to be dealt with. For example, recall the number of assets that seem to disappear not only when people leave the company, but on a daily basis. Knowing what assets you have available, assigned to whom and being able to conduct inventory controls on them will enable you to act quickly and even to prevent a security breach that could possibly lead to costly law suits.

After the security challenges Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) brought with it, now the Internet of Things will bring very similar challenges in regard to security. Many more assets, and not only the typical IT assets, that are or will be connected to the outside world and can even be controlled from a distance. Tracking these assets, registering them and following them up will be critical.

When organizations employ a “good” asset management processes there are a a number of  benefits from integration with the other service management processes, such as incident, problem and change management. Research shows that the service desk efficiency can even go up by 20 percent if there is a good integration.

Some examples: If the service desk knows what asset an end user is calling about without having to physically go to the user to examine the asset, this immediately saves the service desk time. As a bonus, this fact alone has a positive impact on the customer experience. Another example is the way your service desk can make better decisions if they have more insight into the details of an asset, such as warranty and contract date, history of incidents and foreseen changes.

Imagine a printer is not working, but when examining all of the details of the asset, the service desk agent sees in the service management system that the printer will be replaced within the next week. In such a case, armed with this new information, it probably makes more sense to give the end user a workaround (for instance, using another printer for the time being) rather than putting a lot of energy in trying to fix an asset that will be replaced anyway.

Where to begin implementing

There are some challenges to overcome when implementing or improving asset management. First, you need to have executive support. Starting off with a good ROI calculation usually does the trick. Think about what is lacking at this point and what this lack is costing the business, keeping the above examples in mind.

The next challenge is to secure committed resources. Where a lot of organizations are hesitant to dedicate staff full time in the position, using a “center of excellence” approach may be more easily accepted. This is usually the first step, and with time, executives may become more receptive to the idea of having a full-time role.

The last challenge is to look for a good toolset to support your asset management. When setting the scope for the tool, it’s a good idea to set the scope wider than IT assets so as to be ready for future roll outs of asset management within the organization. Asset management is a reality in departments such as HR and facilities, especially with the emergence of the Internet of Things. Allowing a shared tool to be one source of the different assets of the entire organization will not only increase visibility and efficiency, it might even be a first step toward working together on other aspects of service management, too; leading to a  shared service management environment.

Nancy Van Elsacker is president of TOPdesk USA, a division of the global supplier of service management software and consultancy services.