IBM’s Mark Lynch tells the anecdote of an organization that had five business units sharing a piece of its IT infrastructure. When it came time to allocate costs, each unit was charged 20 percent. Only after managers had applied an automated usage tracking system did they discover that one unit was consuming 60 percent of the resources.
IT asset management isn’t exactly rocket science. Almost every system routinely maintains a log of its activity. System administrators access the log, which usually is a simple flat text file, retrieve the data, and put it into a spreadsheet for analysis. Sounds simple enough until you find yourself facing hundreds of systems and applications, dozens of business units, and maybe thousands of individual users of those systems.
Enter automation. IT vendors have identified asset management as a prime candidate for automation. Lynch, naturally, touts IBM’s Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (ITUAM) as the way to eliminate the cost allocation guesswork engaged in by many companies today.
Do you know what each business unit is consuming in terms of IT resources? Many organizations don’t even bother to track it. Rather, they just divide the cost equally between the business units. It’s simple, easy, makes sense, and seems fair. Unfortunately, it often is wrong.
And the process of accessing the logs itself is a tedious, laborious task that entails logging onto each system individually as the administrator. This kind of scut work usually is dumped on the person lowest in the pecking order. It is no wonder that the task rarely gets done; there always is something more important to do.
Based on information like this, you can effectively manage and optimize resources as you identify and rein in resource hogs. You even may find resources so lightly used you can get rid of them. The old B-school adage — you can’t manage what you don’t measure — applies to IT resources as much as it applies to any other corporate resource.
Even in this recession Big Fat Finance, both IDC and Gartner project IT spending worldwide to increase, albeit at low single-digit rates, for the next few years. Not surprisingly, IT asset management has emerged as a critical discipline as IT usage and the corresponding expenditures balloon. As expected, there even is an association that focuses on the practice, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, Inc.
Asset management tools will give you fast, timely, and accurate measurements of IT resource usage, maybe for the first time. You can bet there will be people in your organization who would prefer that you not know. ###
–> Know who is using how much of which IT asset and when
–> Allocate costs based on actual usage, not guesswork
–> Initiate an accurate and fair chargeback program
–> Discover over- and underutilized IT assets
CA, previously known as Computer Associates, provides IT Asset and Financial Management Software. BMC, another leading management software provider, offers Remedy Asset Management. HP also provides IT asset management software, called HP Asset Manager. And these are just the big guys; scores of smaller vendors offer myriad automated asset management tools.
Tools like these don’t come cheap, but they can pay for themselves in several ways. Specifically, they let you:
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