Rethinking Information Technology Asset Management

Jeremy L. Boerger

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781637420157
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: IT Industry
• Index: Business

This book is intended for business leaders and IT executives who are tired of missed budget forecasts, unexpected software audit penalties, untrustworthy CMDB or Asset MDR reports, and idea that this is "just the way it is."

Information technology asset management (ITAM) and software asset management (SAM) is hard. Annual IT budget forecasts rarely hold up for the entire year. There are plenty of excuses given:

• Untrustworthy reporting from the CMDB or MDR
• Unplanned version upgrades or platform refreshes
• Unapproved software, license, or cloud computing subscriptions coming due
• Unanticipated software license audit penalties
• And on, and on, and on

• Rethinking Information Technology Asset Management presents a new answer to the problem. Most business leaders and IT managers assume nothing can be done. That these problems are part-and-parcel of modern IT. This book presents a new method – Pragmatic ITAM – that offers permanent solutions to the ignored, underpinning issues driving hardware and software cost overruns.
  
  

  This book is intended for business leaders and IT executives who are tired of missed budget forecasts, unexpected software audit penalties, untrustworthy CMDB or Asset MDR reports, and idea that this is "just the way it is."
  
  

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The oldest documents to survive antiquity are Sumerian receipts estimated to be 7,000 years old. Written in cuneiform on clay tablets, this documentation has all of the recognizable details one would expect in a modern transfer of custody: who is making the purchase, who is recording it, what kind of stuff and how much, and so on.¹

It takes little imagination to frame the scene: the scribe, reed stylus in hand (maybe a few spares tucked into his hair) dutifully recording the contents of the transaction, making small talk with the customer, the late summer sun high in the sky, a light breeze signaling autumn is approaching.

Truly, things have not changed much since. Swap that stylus and tablet for their electronic counterparts (no coincidence, they are also referred to as a stylus and tablet). Paper and ink crank out of a receipt printer on the counter—or are automatically sent via SMS to the purchaser—after money is exchanged. Our modern scribe is still recording the same data: who is making the purchase, who is recording it, what kind of clothing and how much, where the product originated, and so on.²

While the scene might be the same, modern technology has sped up the process. The ancient scribe would have needed to carefully bake his clay tablet to record his work, then filed it away in a document repository near the market for easy retrieval when the king’s tax collectors came to visit. Our modern scribe simply presses an onscreen button with her electronic stylus on her electronic tablet and all her work is instantly saved in a database for safekeeping. When the king’s collectors ask to audit the market, our ancient scribe would retrieve the germane tablets, calculate all the incomes and outgoings, then produce another clay tablet with all of his notes and calculations. That might take a couple of days or even a week. His modern counterpart has her information and reports in seconds.

The steps to create that audit have not changed. Auditors sent not by the King but by software publishers still have the same requirements: documentation of resources used, sold, purchased. Technology has made it easier and faster than ever to collect that information, even automating many of the steps. Why, then, do modern Information Technology (IT) departments still fail so miserably at recording and tracking the disposition of their assets?

According to one survey from 2013, 52 percent of companies expect software audit penalties to exceed 10 percent of their revenue.³ An IT Security survey from 2017 estimated that 47 percent of data breaches were caused by human error including “lost devices” and “not securing the device when away.”⁴ Such breaches are expected to generate costs between $1.1 to $3.8 million dollars per single incident.⁵

It’s no surprise then that an entire industry has cropped up to help organizations get a grip on the problem. IT Asset Management (ITAM) and its subgroup Software Asset Management (SAM) will be valued at over U.S.$1.3 billion by 2024.⁶

What does all this mean? It means you, Technology Executive, are probably on the losing end of these numbers. If left unchecked, IT overspend and unbudgeted audit penalties will bleed your organization dry. In the most dire cases, this overspend can lead to layoffs, a chronic lack of IT resources, and the launch of a vicious cycle where your IT department can never catch up.

How to Use This Book

This book is intended to lay out the central tenets of the Pragmatic ITAM methodology. It’s not an ITAM manual and it won’t hold your hand through implementing ITAM in your business.

It will help you to:

• Come to grips with why your current ITAM program keeps failing

• Understand the asset lifecycle and why it’s so critical in developing an effective ITAM program

• Develop the underlying infrastructure necessary to launch a successful ITAM program

• Learn what it means for your asset data to be inarguably accurate and be prepared to weaponize that data in the case of a software license audit

• Identify the right people to place on your ITAM team, and how to help them succeed

You’ll be able to use this book not only as an introduction to my methodology but also as a reference when the time comes to manage, troubleshoot, and leverage your ITAM data.

Why This Book Is Necessary

This book is for the IT executive who is not an ITAM expert but who knows that their business needs to be doing a better job of managing its technology assets, including hardware and software.

Pragmatic ITAM is not the first ITAM methodology or resource available to technology executives or ITAM professionals. But after decades of working in this arena, it became impossible for me to ignore the limitations of these existing resources. Broadly speaking, the resources out there will tell you and your team what’s required of an effective ITAM program but they won’t help you figure out how to meet those requirements.

That’s the gap that I’m aiming to fill with Pragmatic ITAM.

The two most commonly referred to resources in ITAM are ITIL and ISO/IEC 19770.

Pragmatic ITAM is designed to augment, support, and realize the full potential of ITIL and 19770, not replace them.

ITIL

Version 4 of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITILv4) was released in 2019. Previous iterations of this body of knowledge gave only a passing mention or recognition to ITAM and SAM as a discipline, but never provided any real guidance or advice on hardware and software assets. This book seeks to resolve this oversight by detailing how ITAM and specifically SAM and SAM tools can help businesses meet their cost-savings goals by optimizing IT resources usage.

ISO/IEC 19770

Even broader than ITIL, the ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical Commission) create worldwide standardization guidelines for technology and beyond. ISO/IEC 19770 is the set of standardization guidelines that apply directly to ITAM.

As of 2017, the ISO/IEC guidelines are based around the idea of three total tiers of ITAM program sophistication:

1. Trustworthy Data: Essentially, this means being able to confirm that what you know about your computing environment is accurate.

2. Lifecycle Integration: Once you have established a level of trustworthy data, it is expected that you can move on to applying lifecycle tags to your assets, to realize “greater efficiency and cost-effectiveness.”⁷

3. Optimization: Finally, these standards outline that an ITAM program with trustworthy data and lifecycle integration will be able to leverage their data repository for business advantage (e.g., moving assets through the lifecycle more quickly, recovering and reusing hardware assets and software licenses efficiently, etc.)

Each tier builds on the one before it. As you go through this book, you will be able to see how the Pragmatic ITAM methodology is set up to help you achieve each tier that’s set forth by these standards.

How Pragmatic ITAM Is Different

One of the differences between Pragmatic ITAM and other methodologies is that it can act as an early warning system for your ITAM failures. Pragmatic ITAM is designed to help you instantly see the gaps in your knowledge, show you why these particular areas are failing (or on the way there) and prescribe the best way to fix your shortfalls. With the right implementation, it can do this way before an auditor comes along and wants to charge you for those shortfalls.

With the right ITAM approach, there is an opportunity to align technology needs with overall business goals—and that opportunity is already in your budget. I want to help you leverage that opportunity.

Here’s what I know to be true:

1. Most ITAM initiatives fail because they are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data coming into the program

2. Most corporations fail their software audits because they know less about their computing environment than the software publishers do

3. Most configuration management databases (CMDBs) and asset managed data repositories (MDRs) f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Description
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Philosophy of ITAM
• Chapter 3 Starting Pragmatic ITAM: Phase One
• Chapter 4 Starting Pragmatic ITAM: Phase Two
• Chapter 5 Starting Pragmatic ITAM: Phase Three
• Chapter 6 Weaponizing Your ITAM During Mergers, Acquisitions, and Software License Audits
• Chapter 7 Building the Infrastructure for a Successful ITAM Program
• Chapter 8 The Future of ITAM
• Chapter 9 Conclusion
• Appendix A: Common ITAM “Critical Fields”
• Appendix B: Pragmatic ITAM Acronyms
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Backcover