Gaining full visibility into siloed, hidden and hoarded IT assets allows organisations to see more, control more and spend less.
This is according to Alvin Barnard, Principal Solutions Consultant at OpenText, who says hidden assets, fragmented data and unmanaged software aren’t just operational headaches, they’re wasted budget, compliance risk and missed strategic opportunities.
Barnard says organisations should be working to achieve full asset visibility and insights to drive measurable financial and operational impact, optimise spend and enable smarter ITSM, ITAM and SAM governance.
“Total asset visibility (TAV) unifies asset data across IT, operations and finance. It turns fragmented IT asset data into real-time insights that you need to drive efficiency, reduce risk and unlock the true operational and financial value of all your assets,” he says.
Asset management hurdles
Barnard says some of the biggest asset management challenges in organisations today are the distributed management of assets, inconsistent process controls and a lack of organisational awareness.
“Because IT and enterprise assets are purchased, received, and/or often managed in a distributed manner, this can result in a lack of visibility of the assets, which subsequently impacts audits and validation. This can also lead to workers’ perceptions that the assets ‘belong’ to them and not the organisation,” he says. “There is a tendency for department managers and end-users to hold onto assets they do not use at all or on a regular basis, which includes laptops, desktops, mobile devices and software applications. This ‘asset hoarding’ can lead to continued purchasing of assets the same as those already owned, but not used or fully utilised. Unused IT and enterprise assets pose increased security and audit risks, as well as driving up costs related to acquiring assets.”
Barnard also highlights the problem of inconsistent or a lack of process controls: “Due to a distributed approach, IT asset management (ITAM), software asset management (SAM) and enterprise asset management (EAM) may be perceived as functions, rather than an unified, organisational discipline. This means any processes and controls that do exist are only applied to the function – not to the organisation.”
He says the challenge with this is policy enforcement: “Many asset policies are at the enterprise levels and don’t reflect the reality or current state of the assets. A common issue with policies, regardless of whether they are valid, is that they are not enforced as they should be. This exposes great financial, compliance and security risks to the organisation.”
Another challenge is organisational awareness, he says. “Even where there are policies and proper processes and controls in place, the organisation (both IT and the enterprise) may not be fully aware of what they are, or why they are important, and may simply ignore them or bypass them,” he says.
“Problems arise either because of no defined scope and/or an understanding of what constitutes an IT asset, an outdated scope, or just a scope that is not well-defined or commonly understood, people are left to their own determination and assumption about what they’re supposed to do when it comes to purchasing or managing IT assets.”
This can lead to shadow IT and external purchasing of assets, which is often, but not always, caused by a traditional procurement-focused approach. Barnard says this typically indicates a lack of awareness of the proper IT or enterprise asset acquisition processes, or the lack of these processes, but is also influenced by the perceived lack of responsiveness from the IT organisation. This can lead to uncontrolled IT assets being introduced into the enterprise, which increases costs as well as security and compliance risks.
Barnard adds that while ITAM and SAM can be managed separately, converging these disciplines and sharing the tools and processes used can reduce complexity and costs.
Overcoming asset management challenges
OpenText Asset Management (formerly known as Asset Management X - AMX) overcomes the challenges associated with IT and SAM with a native Universal CMDB to unite assets and configuration items so different IT teams communicate from a single frame of reference. Its native service asset configuration management (SACM) means ITSM teams like service desk agents can see stock on hand to fulfil requests and ITAM teams can see the impact on services when replacing or repairing assets. It includes all aspects of ITAM like hardware, portfolio, vendor, contract, procurement and financial management, as well as software and SaaS management, and the ability to manage enterprise assets like vehicles, consumables, building mechanical components and more.
OpenText Asset Management is easy to implement, and for existing OpenText Service Management customers, expanding to ITAM doesn’t require any integration work.
“Customers can simply upgrade to Open Service Management Premium to enjoy all the functionality of OpenText Asset Management, with low total cost of ownership, flexible licensing and the ability to pay only for what you need. Available on-premises or as a SAAS solution, OpenText Asset Management is a low code/no code solution supported by OpenText Universal Discovery, which automatically discovers, maps, and manages configuration items to create a single source of truth for IT operations. Plus, you can easily leverage your asset data across all your OpenText IT operations cloud solutions,” Barnard concludes.
For more information, access a free webinar on asset management software here.
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