CHAPTER 2: BASIC LOGISTICS AND INVENTORY
What are the challenges?
• How do I set the best scope, range and remit for my project?
• Is this project going to have any impact on my organisation?
• How do I make sure that the project doesn’t run out of steam?
So, having been forced to consider how we missed our major opportunity to prevent our current predicament way back at the turn of the century, and also having taken a look at the situation that we may now find ourselves in, how do we consider moving forward and getting our house in order?
Well, first be assured that investment in an Asset Management project will deliver a return. This may not come at first – when the majority of groundwork and discovery is being put in – but as the project starts to mature and the information that is gathered is pieced together, you will start to find opportunities to make savings. Some savings will be larger and some smaller, but all of them will be opportunities nonetheless, creating a snowball effect as your project rolls downhill, gathering more and more mass on its journey, and becoming a bigger and bigger force for positive change within your organisation.
So where to start? As a song writer once put it, ‘At the very beginning’. This is, of course, a very good place to start and, in this case, it’s with a basic inventory. The primary desire is to know what you own, what these things are in detail, where they are physically, and even, perhaps, who the primary users of them are.
So what do you own? Do you have any physical proof of purchase? Let’s make an assumption here: let’s say that equipment bought during the last five years could feasibly still have an active role in your organisation. Goodness knows, I’ve seen some organisations that are surviving on technology well over ten years old, either because they haven’t bothered to change it, haven’t had the capital to spend on a refresh or, in some instances, have not been able to find any better alternative.
This means that at the outset you should not be too surprised about what you may find in your organisation’s dark and dingy corners. It also means that you cannot rely on procurement information alone to complete your inventory – even having five years of comprehensive records may not be going back far enough to take everything into account.
Let’s start to consider the various areas that your project may take you into, so that we can start to break the workload down and prioritise. For example, if we think about hardware generally, this could be split into the following:
• Desktop hardware
• Portable computer
• Server hardware
• Communications hardware
• Telecommunication equipment
• Handheld devices
• Virtual machines.
Trying to capture all of these items in one go would be too much for all but the most small and compact environments. Capturing server hardware and associated communications equipment can be a bit easier, as the majority of this will typically reside in a secure server or computer room and, as such, is unlikely to physically move around greatly while you try to carry out an audit.
Desktop and portable hardware – laptop equipment, for example – will pose a bit more of a challenge. Nothing will be able to beat completing a physical audit, but actually capturing laptop users in the building may be difficult if they are field- or home-based staff. So some other tactics may need to be considered.
One of the ways to capture inventory data would be to engage with your end-user community in some way to ask if they have equipment that they believe is assigned to them or that they take responsibility for. You can assume, in the majority of cases, that an organisation will at least know who is on the payroll and so who is likely to be using a company asset. If that kind of report is unavailable, then there is a good chance your organisation is leaking money like a sieve and will not be around for too long; so it may be time to start looking for a new job!
Sending out an initial e-mail to all those on your employee list (asking for information via voting buttons, for example), will give you a baseline in terms of the number of items that you will need to start looking for and registering. On average, when considering traditional IT usage amongst corporate employees, you can consider that there will be no more than two devices per employee that connect to your IT systems. That’s considering traditional devices (i.e. desktops, laptops, or other PC-style workstation devices) but, in this new decade, with the dawning of what’s termed as the millennial generation, we find that typically the number of connected devices is somewhat higher – on average closer to four devices per individual, as this will now typically include phones, smart phones, handhelds and tablet devices, to name but a few.
Investigating the possibility of a management application or discovery tool that could be deployed in your environment to find every connected device would be a good move, as such devices yield a high percentage of visibility. You will, however, need to set aside a budget for purchasing such an application.
Looking at reports from your domain name servers also can yield an understanding of the devices within your environment, as they will show both the number of IP addresses that are consumed and provide links to the device names.
Now, although I would recommend you start by building a comprehensive hardware asset listing, I am aware that a major objective in IT Asset Management is usually software licence control. I am a firm believer that software is always installed on something; it may be accessed and used by someone, but it has to reside somewhere and so, if you do not know where all your hardware is, how can you ever, hand on heart, be certain that somewhere in your organisation there isn’t a PC with £25,000 worth of un-catalogued software installed, just sitting waiting to introduce you to the legal processes associated with prosecuting under-licensed customers?
Finally, once discovered, you will need to identify each device individually, so as to avoid double-counting. One way to do this is to introduce asset numbers, although this does create specific issues with regards to recognition if the label is removed and linking to the electronic identity that will be seen on your network. The key thing to remember is that you will need a unique identifier for each device – even if it is just the manufacturer’s serial number – and that unique identifier needs to be recorded accurately and will be the key that holds all the rest of the asset information together.
Remember:
• 100% records of inventory is a target to aim for, but 100% accuracy of your data is an absolute necessity for data integrity.
• Implementing and maintaining inventory-related processes will be a catalyst for cultural change.
• Without the solid foundation of an inventory, the rest of the house will be unstable.