ITSM Service Asset & Configuration Management


Two numbers highlighting the importance for accurate IT inventory accounting: 
  • IT Asset normally makes up the biggest spend category after IT salary 
  • More than 50% of IT spending is allocated for ongoing IT operations and maintenance
Yet, after the initial inventory population, most IT organization forget to place sufficient controls in the inventory updating process assuming this to be a straightforward task. The result is an inventory that is never complete and can never achieve a high level of accuracy.

Here are some insights how to go about achieving 95% inventory completeness and accuracy. Note that getting to this level of accuracy requires a shift in the organization culture and will take years to bear fruits.

Overall: Hardware and Software
  • Get the inventory management controls and compliance right first before venturing into CMDB initiatives (as defined in ITIL V2) or the more ambitious SKMS(as defined in ITIL V3). Some indicators that your organization has the discipline and maturity for CMDB initiatives and beyond:
    • Overall: The inventory is no more than 2 days out of date
    • Hardware: Achieving 95% accuracy from a 60% sample size audit independent of the inventory
    • Software:  When an unauthorized software is installed on a machine, the user gets a call from the Asset Management Team requesting for a charge code or face the software being uninstalled
  • If you have more than 500 records to maintain, the Excel worksheet is no longer a good tool for inventory management. It is time to consider an integrated ITSM tool. There are a range tools out there from freeware like Spiceworks to the premium ITIL certified BMC suite. Take your pick. 
  • Have as few people as possible updating the IT inventory. A good guide is 1 resource to 10000 records. All changes to the inventory must go through a request for change process. Make a rule that no IT assets can be added,moved or changed without first an approval from the Asset Management Team. If this is not possible, hold the asset change owner accountable in raising a request for change ticket no more than x(a number) days from successful change date. 
  • Make service owners and site owners accountable for the accuracy of the different inventory type through performance goals.
  • The inventory is most frequently used for budgeting purposes so if there are multiple financial models for budgeting and billing, a centralized inventory system may not be realistic unless some flexibility in given for regional/local fields coupled with a strong and customizable reporting feature
  • The IT procurement and finance capital expenditure processes MUST BE tightly coupled to the IT Inventory process. Purchase Order # and Finance Asset Tag # must be made mandatory fields from the start and sufficient controls created to ensure the validity of the data in these 2 fields with the procurement and fix asset dataset.
  • Run annual hardware refresh as a project and ensure both hardware and software inventory audits are performed prior to purchasing and before project closure. 
  • Physical sighting is no longer feasible in today's mobile device era or when IT equipment spans over 200 records. Consider using user verification method by email or discovery tools for audits.
Software specific:
  • Most organization are worrying about licensing compliance rather than if their software usage is optimized
  • Work on enterprise user licensing agreements for your biggest software spent
  • Use as few software purchasing partners as possible to enable easy licensing reporting. 
  • Always buy software maintenance to ease version entitlement management. 
  • If you need to create a software inventory from scratch: 
    • Use discovery tools to get an estimated number of software installed first
    • Get an entitlement list from your software purchasing partner(s) 
    • Compare the 2 datasets and work on the delta
      • Over-installed licenses: Start discussion with the business to buy or uninstall. Start with the biggest spent value item 
      • Under-installed licenses: Begin software optimization exercise
  • Software discovery and software reconciliation tools are great in detecting and reporting licensing compliance and software usage pattern but without dedicated resources reviewing and acting upon these reports, these tools will be wasted investment.
Here is an example of an Asset Management SOP and the relevant documents (prefix IT.AM) that goes with this process.
Updated : May 2012

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