Management Summary:
Since ITIL 4, the topic of IT Asset Management has been given significantly more importance with its own practice. An IT organization can only manage the existing assets in a value-oriented way with a correct IT Asset Management. Service Manager does not offer its own asset management by default. The Operaio IT Asset Management for SCSM is therefore the missing building block to build a 100% successful IT Asset Management.
AN INSIGHT FROM ADRIAN’S (CEO) WORK ROUTINE:
One topic has always accompanied me since the beginning of my ITSM Consulting career – IT Asset Management. Maybe it’s my studies as a business computer scientist or the fact that entrepreneurial thinking has always interested me. However, the connection between technology and the business aspect has always been very fascinating for me. Which is why I have been advising and assisting my clients on this topic for years. Nonetheless, in my opinion the IT Asset Management always received too little attention because it contains very important information for an organization that must always be up to date.
In ITIL version 3, asset management was also rather neglected. In version 4 of ITIL there has been a very interesting and absolutely correct change: an Asset Management Practice has been created and the topic has been given more importance. See blogpost from Axelos: IT asset configuration management: IT asset configuration management: ITIL 4’s SVS | Axelos
A central element among ITIL 4 is value orientation, which we have learned early on as a basic principle in the Foundation Course. Thus, it is absolutely logical that IT Asset Management now gets its own practice – because we try to use our assets in a value-oriented way!
EXAMPLE CASE:
I repeatedly experience moments with customers who consider it unnecessary to invest money in the development of IT asset management. Answers like “We have everything under control” or “An Excel spreadsheet will be sufficient” are used surprisingly often. But is this really the case? Hand on heart! Imagine the following scenario: a long-term employee leaves the company at the end of the month. Is anyone in the organization able to determine if this person has a notebook, home office monitors (ongoing topic since the pandemic) and a company cell phone? Who makes sure that all of these devices are taken back? Who is responsible for determining which licenses are released and can now be reused? This is just one small case where an always up-to-date IT asset management is required. Therefore, you should always be able to determine which assets you have in the organization, where they are and who is paying for them. Only in this way the existing assets can be managed in a value-oriented way!
SOLUTION:
Service Manager, as delivered by Microsoft, can only provide very limited support here. Some configuration management is certainly possible – but definitively not real IT asset management. Here the Operaio IT Asset Management for SCSM can be a very useful extension. We deliver in a ready-to-use module with numerous additional classes, forms and also workflows to enable you to run IT Asset Management in the Service Manager. However, it is important to understand: 80% of the success in Asset Management are the processes, which have to be defined and implemented – only 20% is the tool. However, we can make you 100% successful with our knowledge and our tool!
Interested? Contact us, we will be happy to organize a live demo of the solution and inspire you with our latest product – Operaio Asset Management for SCSM