This Top 5 list is inspired by a BMC blog written by Cris Scruggs. Blazent typically interacts with IT Asset Management (ITAM) professionals in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) data quality context. This blog will expand on the first 5 of Cris’s list from that perspective. The best practices include:
- Have an executive champion
- Organize your ITAM implementation team thoughtfully
- Don’t boil the ocean
- Define criteria for what constitutes a critical asset
- Follow the lifecycle-based approach to ITAM
- Have an executive champion: Executive sponsorship is critical. The outcome of a successful asset management initiative will require executive involvement to ensure its adoption across the organization. Executive involvement also ensures adequate funding for any ITAM initiative.
- Organize your ITAM implementation team thoughtfully: Involving team members throughout the implementation process from its inception promotes an early buy-in from participants and helps them resist the temptation to become distracted by other projects. Having the application users involved in decisions about what attributes are tracked ensures they’ve populated the ITAM properly when the implementation is complete.
- Don’t boil the ocean: Biting off more than you can chew is a classic reason for ITAM project failures. Start with a single high-cost application, such as salesforce automation or SAP, and when you know that you have reached your objectives with that application, phase in others.
- Define criteria for what constitutes a critical asset: It is prudent to review each existing asset to identify if it is still current and adding value to the business. Check that it has been used during the past month to ensure you are not tracking unused assets. An accurate CMDB can tell you how one asset relates to another. Performing basic dependency checking helps to ensure you don’t expend energy tracking orphaned assets.
- Follow the lifecycle-based approach to ITAM: Every asset has a lifecycle that starts with a request to Procurement through to retirement. In the case of storage, the last phase may even be the supervised destruction of the storage media. Defining a rigorous process to follow an asset through its entire lifecycle ensures security and cost efficiency and promotes process automation for scalability.
Asset management has evolved into a function that was formerly only concerned with financial management. During the years its charter has expanded to support the requirements of functions including security, IT operations and corporate responsibility. Blazent recently hosted an insightful webinar titled, “IT Asset Management: The Data Perspective,” which details the challenges of integrating the asset management function into an organization from a data management viewpoint. You can watch on-demand here.