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IT Asset Management enterprise visibility

An Executive White Paper

Contents The Challenge ................................................................................................................................................ 2

Business Goals of ITAM ................................................................................................................................. 3

ITAM Capability Maturity Model .................................................................................................................. 4

Stage 1: No Process in Place ......................................................................................................................... 5

Stage 2: The Reactive Stage .......................................................................................................................... 6

Stage 3: The Proactive Stage ......................................................................................................................... 7

Stage 4: Beyond The Proactive Stage............................................................................................................ 8

It Asset Management Integration ............................................................................................................. 9

Service Oriented ITAM ............................................................................................................................ 10

Stage 5: The Value Oriented Stage ............................................................................................................. 11

Lowry’s Asset Control System ..................................................................................................................... 12

Asset Tracking in the Data Center with ACS ITAM ...................................................................................... 13

Why Lowry for IT Asset Management? ....................................................................................................... 14

About Lowry ................................................................................................................................................ 14

1 www.LowryComputer.com

IT Asset Management enterprise visibility IT Asset Management (ITAM) is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for many organizations.

The Challenge IT departments are coming under increasing pressure to cut costs, enhance IT asset security, increase regulatory compliance and improve their IT asset auditing procedures. To meet these demands, organizations are turning to IT Asset Management systems. IT Asset Management (ITAM) affects all branches of an organization including financial, contractual, and inventory to support life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Managing IT assets has become more and more difficult due to the rapid growth of mobile devices and applications, increased personnel turnover, and the need for greater computing power for both internal and external applications. The relatively short life cycle of many assets along with the need to upgrade assets due to continual technological improvements adds to the challenges of IT asset management. ITAM’s main challenge is to take responsibility for the life cycle management of IT assets throughout an organization. This includes development and maintenance of policies, standards, processes, systems, and measurements that enable an organization to manage their IT Asset Portfolio. Risk, cost, control, IT Governance, compliance, and business performance all must be taken into consideration.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_life_cycle_management

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IT_Governance

IT Asset Management must control costs and improve performance and accountability of assets.

Business Goals of ITAM The business goals of ITAM apply uniformly throughout all departments of the organization. Among the most important are the following:

Uncover savings through process improvement and support for strategic decision making

Gain control of the inventory Increase accountability to ensure compliance Enhance performance of assets and their life cycle management Improve availability time of the business/applications/processes


Where are you on the ITAM Capability Maturity Chart?

ITAM Capability Maturity Model

The table below represents the various stages of ITAM Capability Maturity. All organizations with IT assets fall somewhere on this chart, from a state in which no plan or system is in place to manage their IT assets, all the way to full Service and Value Oriented IT Asset Management.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) Capability Maturity Model

Level Characteristics Savings Observed Source: META Group

Company Distribution Source: META Group

Value Oriented

• Utilizing cross-organizational and cross-discipline techniques to maximize asset value and minimize costs

• Tracking and realizing concrete savings 45%

5% Service Oriented

• Asset management integrated with back-end systems (e.g. HR, Finance, Help Desk, CMDB)

• Leveraging cross-organizational information 35%

Proactive • Formalized Processes in Place • Policies and Procedures are linked • Centralized Asset Repository

15% 20%

Reactive • Firefighting mode • Beginning of defined and implemented policies • Basic process development

5% 75%

No Process

• No formalized process • No formal approach to asset management _______


The desperate situation too many organizations are finding themselves in. The Solution — Lowry’s Asset Control System for ITAM (ACS ITAM)

Stage 1: No Process in Place Unfortunately, this is the stage that many organizations will find themselves. At this stage, the organization finds itself trying to keep track of an ever-growing inventory of hardware and software assets of all sizes and shapes with no real plan or organized process. If this describes your situation, there is good news: you have the opportunity to immediately start turning things around. There are simple steps you can take that will quickly deliver impressive results. From the bottom of the ITAM Capability Maturity model there is only one way to go… up! Implementing ACS ITAM as a stand-alone ITAM solution will boost you up the chart all the way to the Proactive stage. From there, over time, ACS ITAM can be further integrated into your existing ERP and other system(s) to achieve the highest levels of ITAM maturity.

Figure 1 No Process - "Chaos"


Just beyond “Chaos” The Solution — Lowry’s Asset Control System for ITAM (ACS ITAM)

Stage 2: The Reactive Stage At this stage, the organization has begun to acknowledge that a plan of some kind needs to be implemented to get a handle on the vast number of varied IT assets that have been accumulating at an ever growing pace. Perhaps some initial policies have been drafted and are starting to be implemented. Maybe even some spreadsheets holding increasingly difficult to maintain asset lists. Unfortunately, this may be a case of “too little, too late”, and the organization finds itself more and more resorting to “firefighting mode.” If you find that this describes your situation, there is still hope — you have acknowledged the problem and begun to address it, but you recognize that much more remains to be done. Again, implementing ACS ITAM at this stage can quickly put you on the path to gaining control of your IT assets and moving you up the ITAM Capability Maturity chart to the Proactive level. With ACS ITAM you now have the means to not only implement policies and procedures but track and manage them. By taking advantage of Lowry’s software and engineering services you can, over time, further customize the ACS ITAM solution to achieve the Service and Value Oriented ITAM maturity levels.

Figure 2 Reactive Phase- "Firefighting" 6 www.LowryComputer.com

Implementing ACS ITAM will make you “Proactive”

Stage 3: The Proactive Stage At this stage, the organization has begun to get a handle on its IT assets. Formalized processes are now in place and policies and procedures are linked. This is the position that a basic stand-alone implementation of ACS ITAM can achieve for you. If your organization is already at the Proactive stage, implementing ACS ITAM and customizing it to integrate with other components of your IT management system along with your ERP and other Corporate systems can take you to the highest levels of ITAM maturity.

Figure 3 Proactive Stage - Moving Forward


Achieving the highest levels of the ITAM Capability Maturity Model

Stage 4: Beyond The Proactive Stage Once an organization moves beyond the Proactive stage and achieves the “Service Oriented” and/or “Value Oriented” stages, you will achieve the highest rewards possible. ACS is the foundation that enables you to achieve those levels. Lowry can move you up the ITAM Capability Maturity Chart through our software and engineering consulting services to Service and Value Oriented ITAM maturity levels.

Figure 4 Moving Forward with Lowry Consulting


Reaching the Service and Value Oriented Stages through the ACS IT Asset Management System.

It Asset Management Integration In its role as the core component of a comprehensive IT Asset Management deployment, ACS provides some or all of the following depending on your needs and goals:

• Integrates with Procurement systems • Integrates with the system monitoring and usage tools • Coordinates asset inventory and assignment to assist in Change

Management • Tracks asset inventory and service bundles to improve Help Desk • Coordinates with VAR catalog functions to allow receipt of asset data

as assets are procured • Tracks the movement of assets from location to location

Figure 5 ACS as Core of ITAM Repository


Service Oriented ITAM ACS as the core component

Figure 6 ACS ITAM Integrated with other IT systems for Service Oriented stage


Achieving the highest levels of the ITAM Capability Maturity Model

Stage 5: The Value Oriented Stage A stand-alone implementation of ACS ITAM can serve as the basis from which you can move to the highest levels of ITAM Capability including the Service and Value Oriented levels. At the Value Oriented stage of ITAM maturity you will see:

Savings through process improvement Support for strategic decision making Control of the inventory Increased accountability to ensure compliance Enhanced performance of assets and their life cycle management Improved availability time of the business/applications/processes

If you are not at this high stage of ITAM capability, Lowry can help you get there, no matter where you are at present on the ITAM Capability Maturity Model. In the last analysis, you must decide how far you want your organization to move. The Value Oriented stage is not necessarily for everyone. No matter what level of ITAM Capability you aspire to, all organizations will benefit from achieving at least the Proactive stage, which is what a stand-alone implementation of ACS ITAM guarantees, along with a high ROI.

Figure 7 Fully Integrated Mature ACS ITAM Implementation for Value Oriented Stage


ACS as the ITAM foundation.

Lowry’s Asset Control System An implementation of Lowry’s Asset Control System (ACS) as the ITAM foundation together with our knowledge of ITAM and our wide-ranging Professional Services will quickly enable you to advance up the ITAM Capability Maturity Model from either No Plan in Place or Reactive stage, to the Proactive Stage. ACS is designed to easily integrate with other IT systems including CMDBs, ERPs, and many others, which guarantees you will move up the ITAM Capability Maturity Model from whatever level you might currently be at. ACS is a scalable software product that combines barcode and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology with flexible relational database software to enable organizations to make immediate headway up the ITAM Capability Maturity Model. ACS can start as a simple stand-alone implementation and then scale to Enterprise complexity, or be implemented at the Enterprise Service Oriented or Value Oriented level immediately. With ACS, users can quickly and easily locate any IT asset, reduce the time required for audits or inventories, and track the complete life cycle history of any asset from acquisition to disposal. Depending on your ITAM requirements, ACS deployments can include barcode scanners and handheld or stationary RFID fixed readers, best-in-class barcode label printers, and RFID tags of various sizes and configurations.


Implementing an ACS ITAM solution.

Asset Tracking in the Data Center with ACS ITAM Both barcode labels and RFID tags/labels have their place when discussing asset tracking. One place where RFID labels prove of great value over barcode labels is in the data center. While barcode labels must be scanned one at a time and up close in a process that could take hours or days in a large data center, RFID tags can be read instantly …from up to 30 feet. Reduced inventory time within their data centers was a major factor in one major financial institution’s selection of ACS for IT asset tracking. This institution’s policies required that 10 percent of its assets be inventoried every month. Its former barcode-only solution required employees to get close enough to visually identify a label to confirm the count. As a result, no more than10 servers could be scanned and accounted for per hour. Using RFID technology, all of the equipment installed in a room was able to be inventoried in a matter of minutes. The customer estimates that now, with ACS’s RFID solution, they save 1,100 person-hours a year — IT staff time that can be redirected to more productive and strategically important efforts. This one aspect of RFID technology alone accomplishes four of the five business goals (mentioned earlier) of a typical ITAM solution! Equipment servicing, maintenance, and/or removal also benefits from the use of RFID in the data center. In this case, the “Geiger counter” feature on select Motorola handheld RFID readers can wirelessly zero in on the exact asset being sought. This is a tremendous help when racks include multiples of the same item. Additionally, stationary readers can track movement of assets and send alerts or sound alarms if assets are improperly moved from their designated locations. In yet another ACS implementation, fixed readers were stationed at every access point and assets moving in and out of each and every data center were automatically handled within ACS. This highlights the heart of ACS— a flexible solution that enables an organization to track all the information necessary to help it take control of its assets whether by hand or automatically, using barcode labels and/or RFID tags/labels. To ensure that customers achieve the results, scalability, and the ROI they’re after, Lowry delivers ACS ITAM as a complete turnkey solution, including ACS software; all required equipment such as mobile handhelds, label printers, and media; integration with existing systems; training; and ongoing support and professional consulting services in software, hardware/technology, barcodes/tags/labels, and implementation.


Why Lowry Why Lowry for IT Asset Management?

• Comprehensive Offering: Software, Hardware, Tags/Labels, ProfessionalServices, Training, Implementation

• Scalability: We provide Asset Management from Stand-AloneImplementations through Enterprise-Level Operations

• Agile: Software Customization using DSDM including Integration withEnterprise Systems

• Knowledge: 39 Years of Systems Integration experience with CertifiedSystems Engineers

• Resources: PMP Certified Project Management

About Lowry

Since 1974, Lowry Computer Products has been implementing technology innovations nationwide, and with over 10,000 customers, it has established itself as a premier AutoID systems integrator focused on barcode, RFID, biometrics, enterprise mobility, and asset management solutions.

Lowry understands that each enterprise has its own specific issues and requirements, and that in order to provide best-in-class solutions to address these issues, a deep understanding of our clients’ unique business processes is a necessity. To us, success is rooted in our ability to enhance and grow our customer’s business.

Lowry solutions make our customers’ businesses more competitive by providing:

• Cost reduction• Improved business process efficiency• Improved staff productivity• Improved asset/inventory visibility• Supply chain standards compliance• Empowering of the mobile worker


© Lowry Solutions, 2015

it asset management - lowry solutionslowrysolutions.com › wp-content › uploads › 2015 › 08...

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