Industry Leading ITAM Implementations

As part of my ongoing work with the IEC I was fortunate enough to participate on a call with an organization that is ahead of the curve in IT Asset Management.

The principle behind the IEC is to find out what the best companies do, in order to share methodology with peers – not quotations from best practice books or vendor hyperbole, but real results.

Their setup had ITIL overtones, a catalogue of 8 primary services accessible via an intranet with service level, pricing and options. Critically, somehow they had figured out how to align IT asset costs with their service catalogue, no mean feat.

But the success was not due to this being an ITIL implementation, but because they had managed to translate IT talk into recognizable services and units that VP-level managers could understand and manage.

These are the IT Services my department is using, these are my costs, this is my consumption over time and this is how I may influence future costs.

There was no talk of federated-this or ITIL-compliant-that – but purely providing real value.

Cost centre managers could view their monthly IT costs broken down by service and users. It wasn’t a cross-charging bill, but a set of levers to manage changes.

I got the feeling that there was likely to be a lot of excel crunching behind the scenes as data was correlated and reconciled between systems, and it took a lot of work to reach that level of maturity – but it really worked.

I imagine outsourcing choices, selling new innovation concepts and change decisions become very clear cut.