Information technology (IT) asset management and service management practices will increasingly play a pivotal role in the corporate world as they enable IT value positioning and consolidation, and assist in reducing IT expenditure.
However, according to Wilhelm Hamman, a business technologist at Computer Associates Africa, their acceptance has been slow.
"Business executives have been reticent to accept these practices which, nevertheless, are readily available to assist them to make efficient, intelligent decisions that affect bottom line profits," he says.
"Today, increasing levels of business complexity are making efficient, intelligent business decisions more difficult.
"Many IT industry watchers have underlined the pivotal role IT asset management and service management practices have on business decision-making and attaining key business objectives," he notes.
Yet, despite this understanding, a recent survey sponsored by Computer Associates International seemingly contradicts this statement. It reports that only 40% of respondents - all business decision-makers in medium to large corporations - are "thinking about" IT asset management.
"One of the reasons," says Hamman, "is that IT budgets have not yet recovered from the `blind spending` of a few years ago - for Y2K - and that asset management solutions will gain in popularity if combined with improved service delivery and asset consolidation.
"In SA, this is particularly true. SA organisations have been slow to invest in new generation solutions as we are still operating in a difficult IT spending climate," he says.
Hamman believes asset management solutions should be more prolific at this time. "Today, there is much more stringent control over IT spending as companies come to terms with shrinking budgets. Consolidation of assets and their expert management should be the name of the game."
Hamman says asset management is also key to increasing the agility of a business, it`s ability to compete, respond to customers, make high quality decisions and keep costs in line with competition.
"With the introduction of service management practices, such as ITIL [IT Infrastructure Library], a basis is being prepared for asset management in the future.
"This will open the door for improved IT service delivery and well-motivated IT projects. Among these projects will be asset management because it lays a good foundation for server and asset consolidation," he concludes.
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Computer Associates International, Inc (NYSE:CA), the world`s largest management software company, delivers software and services across infrastructure, security, storage and lifecycle management to optimise the performance, reliability and efficiency of enterprise IT environments. Founded in 1976, CA is headquartered in Islandia, New York, and operates in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit http://ca.com.
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