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Kifinti Service Management Newsletter - Third Edition

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Spotlight on IT Asset Management

Thursday January 12, 2012 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EST

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Tuesday January 17, 2012 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EST

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Tuesday March 6, 2012 from 9:00 PM to 3:30 PM EST

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Greetings!

In our third edition of the Kifinti service management newsletter, we are going to be focusing on IT Asset Management.

 

IT Asset Management (ITAM) 

 

Asset management - is an extensively used and often misunderstood term, especially in the context of Information Technology. If you Google Asset Management you will find hundreds of solutions, offerings,and experts talking about how and why what they have to offer is the best. Depending on whom you ask Asset Management can cover everything from IT Assets, Facilities (Building and Plant) and even Financial Asset Management. This edition of our newsletter will help put some clarity around IT Asset Management offerings and discuss how you can leverage your existing investments to help you implement all or pieces of an IT Asset management Strategy. We will also look at what other supporting technologies are available and how to get started. 

 

The key when planning asset management is to understand scope, define what you mean when you say Asset management and to recognize that implementing an effective Asset Management initiative will be all about the processes.

 

Step one - define what you mean - For our purposes, let us assume we are talking about IT Asset Management. When people reference IT Asset Management it can be used to describe software asset management, hardware asset management, software license compliance, software utilization, contract management, evergreen programs. Even things like purchase request, purchase order and management of assets for bill-back by location, department ownership etc. often get included in this scope.

 

Terms used and references

ITAM - IT asset management (ITAM) is the set of business practices that join financial, contractual and inventory functions to support asset life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Assets include all elements of software and hardware that are found in the business environment.

 

CMDB - A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information related to all the components of an information system. It contains the details of the configuration items (CI) in the IT infrastructure. Although data repositories similar to CMDBs have been used by IT departments for many years, the term CMDB stems from IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). In the ITIL context, a CMDB represents the authorized configuration of the significant components of the IT environment. A CMDB helps an organization understand the relationships between these components and track their configuration. The CMDB is a fundamental component of the ITIL framework's Configuration Management process. CMDB implementations often involve federation, the inclusion of data into the CMDB from other sources, such as Asset Management, Purchasing,

Desktop Management, and Change Management systems in such a way that the original source of the data retains control of the data while making the data available in real time to the CMDB. Federation is usually distinguished from Extract, transform, load (ETL) solutions in which data is periodically copied from its original source into the CMDB.

 

CI - The term configuration item or CI refers to the fundamental structural unit of a configuration management system. Examples of CIs include individual requirements documents, software, models, plans, locations, physical hardware components and people. The Configuration management system oversees the life of the CIs through a combination of process and tools by implementing and enabling the fundamental elements of identification, change management, status, accounting, and audits. The objective of the configuration management system is to ensure configuration information is accurate, consistent and up to date. Accurate CI information is key to minimizing the introduction of errors related to lack of testing most often introduced during configuration changes. Complete CI data can also prevent errors by identifying   incompatibilities with other CIs.

 

 

Step two - define the process - Once we have defined the scope, we must begin by identifying when the process starts. For many organizations today, the Purchase Order and Request process are already tightly controlled and managed and the IT Asset Management process begins when they take ownership of the IT Asset. For many organizations this occurs at time of shipment, but for some, it can be at the time of installation. Many organizations feel that this is a daunting project but it doesn't have to be, because many organizations are already tracking all the activities and work of the staff in their Service Desk tool today. To begin making the process of tracking of IT Assets effective, one often only needs more granular tracking of Moves, Adds, Changes and to create associations for these with the affected Configuration Items.  

 

Step three - tool ratification - Many organizations believe they need a different tool to manage assets. In reality, very often they don't and can leverage tools they already own.

 

Example: For one of our municipal customers, we were able to leverage the software they already owned. They did not need to purchase any new software to help them manage their IT Assets and implement a CMDB. We leveraged their existing Service Desk tool (Frontrange HEAT), Desktop Management tool (Microsoft SMS), Network Monitoring tool (Solarwins), Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and used all the information generated within these tools to populate their CMDB/Asset database. Then through ongoing process management, this information is consistently maintained to enable them to manage the entire IT Asset lifecycle.

 

By no means are you limited to the tools in this example. You can leverage other desktop management tools like LANDesk, Novell, Enteo or other network monitoring tools like MOM/SCOM, IBM Tivoli, HP Openview etc. it just depends on the specifics of your project, what you already own and what you need.

  

NOTE: Many organizations start down the path of having a separate tool, like excel or a specific asset management tool, in addition to (and managed separately from) their Service Desk tool and this should be avoided if possible. In some cases, it may appear, there is better functionality available in other standalone Asset Management tools, however keeping IT staff (in the field and at the help desk) engaged is critical to ensure the information is always up to date. Asking them to update information in two places for essentially one activity will ensure this information will quickly become outdated and make extracting detailed and accurate information impossible or at very least very difficult.

 

Before acquiring any new software, it is critical that one spends time to understand and review what tools you own, what they are capable of and to identify any gaps between what you have and what you need. In many cases the biggest gaps are identified as, primarily, process related.

  

Step Four - Tool ratification - AHH....tools my favourite things... let's start with doing a baseline of what discovery & management tools we own and how they are implemented, that will help us implement an effective IT Asset Management strategy. This information will help us understand, what if any additional technology/tools will be required to complete our IT Asset Strategy.

 

First part of the tool discussion is the discovery technology to help us understand "WHAT IS" physically installed. Once we understand what is installed we can work back to the management side, what did we buy, where is it, what are we contractually obligated for etc.   

 

Discovery Technology- This is used to help you understand "WHAT IS" currently installed and used in your environment? Typically we try in our deployments to NOT force customers to purchase a separate discovery tool in addition to their existing management technology, as often the discovery and management tools are agent based and it only makes sense to minimise the proliferation of agents on the endpoints. As desktop management strategy, we try and look at the end point holistically from an Asset management, reporting and security perspective and try to minimize the number of agents on your endpoints (desktops, laptops and server). But th
is whole discussion needs to be saved for a separate post.

 

Discovery tool questionnaire:

Do you have a tool that discovers everything you want to manage in your IT Asset Management initiative?

 

  1. HARDWARE - Desktops, Laptops, tablets, servers, switches, routers, security devices, firewalls, IP enabled phones etc.
  2. SOFTWARE - OS (Windows, MAC, Linux, Unix), Software Programs installed
  3. Virtual and thin client - Is the discovery technology aware of virtual technology? Can it discover and reconcile thin clients like citrix and virtual environments like VMware and virtualized applications?

Most customers have something today that discovers some of what they need and sometimes they own a robust discovery or management tool but have not implemented or integrated a consistent process for using it yet. However many organizations need a new solution, that discovers everything they own, addresses their heterogeneous environments of Windows, MAC, Linux and UNIX, is virtual aware and provides compliance reports in the case of an audit.  

 

FrontRange does offer a complete discovery solution that can augment HEAT, ITSM and other IT Service Management technology, to discover the pieces of IT infrastructure puzzle not yet addressed by existing technology. The FrontRange License Manger technology can even add another dimension to enhance discovery solutions like a Microsoft SMS or SCCM. 

 

FrontRange Discovery - is a leading edge discovery solution, which provides a comprehensive, heterogeneous and granular hardware and software inventory. Discovery collects information on any IP enabled device, the specific hardware and software details, virtual environments, thin clients and has a unique addition, License Manager that simplifies the software license compliance and management process.

 

From a hardware perspective the FrontRange Discovery solution is agent based and the agent is OS agnostic and will run on Windows, MAC, Linux and Unix. This enables the solution to discover virtually all devices in your environment and the specific details of it, right down to the slots and often if a monitor is attached. For those additional devices that the agent doesn't run on, discovery has technology called LANProbe, that will discover all IP enabled devices and the specific details of the device, identify new devices on the network, if they have a discovery agent or not and report back when devices are moved. The discovery agent can help to determine location by leveraging IP networking information.

 

From software perspective the information collected is normalized into primary and secondary applications, as often the amount of information reported on installed applications can be extensive and make the management of this difficult. The software agent interrogates WMI, Add Remove programs and executable and even goes beyond exe names and looks at the executable hash to eliminate issues with renaming files.

 

The discovery solution will also report on software utilization and this information blended with the license manager will help you manage compliance and is then used in the case of an audit.

 

What makes the overall solution unique is the added functionality of License Manager. License Manager is focused on helping you manage your software license compliance, by taking software license information in the form of software keys from Adobe, Microsoft etc. and sales reports from vendors like SHI and CDW and importing them directly into License Manager. By doing this, the information gathered will be compared against an online software catalogue with millions of SKUs, to tell you exactly what you own and the specific entitlements of the software, without having to research it or enter any additional information. Then this information is used against the discovery, to tell you if you are compliant from a software licensing perspective and you can compare this against software utilization to if you need to purchase more licenses or potentially even reduce the amount on your next renewal.

 

Asset Tracking repository / CMDB / Single version of the truth etc. - This is used to help you understand "WHAT SHOULD BE" currently installed on your environment and compare that against the 'WHAT IS".

 

Frontrange HEAT - Has as part of the data model configuration tables included with the solution out of the box. Many of the core tables will allow you to manage your all of assets and in some cases may require additional Configuration Items or Asset Types to be added, to allow you to track all IT Assets/CIs. The good news is the HEAT system can be easily extended to accommodate this and we have done this for many customers.


Frontrange ITSM - Has as part of the ITSM application suite a CMDB that has a very extensive data model, with a CI list that has been updated to reflect the best practices of ITILv3 and has pre-built dashboards and reports to help you manage your Assets and Configuration items.

 

IntegrationAny discovery tool information can be used to populate the Configuration/Asset tables of either HEAT or ITSM CMDB however the benefit of leveraging the FrontRange discovery solution is the extent of the pre-built integration and pre-population of the CMDB without any additional data mapping. 

 

 
 

This is our third edition of our newsletter we have appreciated the feedback, especially with regards to our writers spelling and grammar ...:) 

 

Please keep it up, criticism if it is constructive, will always be appreciated. As always we appreciate your feedback.  We look forward to this newsletter continually evolving into an educational, informative tool that provides insight into new and exciting topics, questions to answers you may have, or simply a way to keep current on the latest offerings."

 

Sincerely,

 

The Kifinti Team!
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