On my first day working for the UK Department of Energy, I met David, who was an Economist and an accomplished application programmer. I remember asking him what it was like to write such complex programs that could forecast energy demand of the country. He replied, “I think of the nation’s energy supply industry as a giant stock control system.” More than 30 years later, I found myself working for a supply chain software supplier, thinking of the logistics industry as a sophisticated stock control system. IT Asset Management (ITAM) started out as not much more than stock tracking of expensive laptops and servers. Today ITAM professionals have a far broader charter. The assets they track need all kinds of associated metadata information in order to be managed effectively. In Configuration Management Database (CMDB) terms, each IT asset is defined as a Configuration Item (CI), each with its associated attributes with details on the party responsible for managing it, whether is purchased or leased, etc. The CMDB is an organization’s most reliable source of sanitized asset data that can be used to validate ITAM databases.
To better understand the impact of data quality for ITAM professionals, let’s take a look at three use cases – License Management, Compliance and Technology refreshes:
License Management
License Management impacts the bottom line of an organization by maximizing the utilization of existing software licenses and avoiding the risk of costly true-ups due to exceeding licensing parameters. The accuracy and completeness of software assets is vital to the purchasing office, for license compliance and even keeping executives out of trouble with auditors and regulators. Managing leases on hardware and SaaS applications is just as important for the same reasons. Thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley regulation section 404, executives are required to attest to the accuracy of an organizations internal finance records and controls.
Compliance
Good data quality reduces the research time needed to identify noncompliant assets. Many assets, such as check printers used by finance are impacted by controls and regulations. Today, these printers would be locked away for general access in a finance area. In the 80’s when I was a young Systems Programmer for British Telecom, we printed refund checks on a million-dollar IBM 3800 mainframe printer at a pace of 7 feet per second. Whenever it got through a box of paper, the finance supervisors watched our operators closely to ensure they did not tamper with the unused black toner to change a number 1 to a 7 for example.
Technology Refreshes
IT Asset Managers play a pivotal role in controlling asset reuse, refresh and retirement. Having an accurate inventory of hardware and software assets ensures an organization makes the best of its available resources, ensuring minimal disruptions during technology refresh initiatives, while optimizing return on investment. One of the progressive examples of technology asset reuse I have seen was using an application to “rent” hardware and software licenses to individuals for the duration of a project such as a branding refresh using contracted staff. When the project ended, all the hardware was automatically wiped and license keys returned to the procurement pool for recycling.
I hope the above use cases demonstrate the breadth of challenges modern ITAM professionals are faced with and how heavily they depend on trustworthy asset data that is both complete and accurate.
My last blog linked here describes the process Blazent uses to provide Data Quality Management for CMDBs so they are populated exclusively with data that has been validated by comparing multiple sources and selecting the most trustworthy source.