The Silver Bullet of Asset Management?

Kevin McGrew, CEO and President of TechTrack Solutions, reveals how to conquer the greatest challenge of asset management: control.

What is the greatest challenge for an IT Asset Manager in the 21^st century workplace?

Kevin McGrew. 90 percent of enterprise organizations have no useful processes in place to track and manage the arrival, deployment, active lifecycle and disposition of IT assets, according to Gartner Group. Gartner also notes that 70 percent of CFOs feel that their fixed IT assets (laptops, monitors, servers, etc.) are being managed inefficiently and erratically. These execs report that their organizations are often unable to even locate these assets reliably. The greatest challenge for 21^st century IT Asset Managers is control. IT asset management is hard, and as technology becomes more pervasive, assets become more mobile and data becomes more sensitive, ITAM is only going to get harder. 

Does complexity act as a barrier to entry for firms that haven't yet enacted any IT asset management protocols?

KM. Not typically, because it's much more painful to do nothing than it is to do something minimal. In my experience, most organizations at least have some form of ad-hoc solution, such as a spreadsheet. These solutions can be as simple as a single file on a desktop, or as elaborate as a network of overlapping worksheets spread across multiple departments and users. This is what we call zero-mile when assessing and implementing ITAM processes in a firm: because if you're here, you're not really anywhere.

Eventually, organizations get tired of the hassle, the inaccuracy and the costly mistakes that these homebrew solutions are fraught with and they go looking for a silver bullet. The larger the organization, the larger the bullet that they think they need. That search is where complexity starts to kill.

What are the outcomes of the choices that firms make when implementing ITAM?

KM. It depends on how the organization chooses to manage risk. There are a lot of supposedly easy options on the market. eDiscovery is a common first stab at ITAM, and what IT managers find is that the solution works better on paper than in practice. Expensive enterprise repositories are another path that typically doesn't provide the initial results that clients expect at that price-point. 

What these companies are missing is the people element: enterprise software is notoriously user-unfriendly, and the 30 percent of its functionality that does get used is often misapplied, or worse, half-applied. ITAM systems need to be built with the end-user in mind, because accuracy is king. Most repositories have 60-70 percent data accuracy, and you can't make executive decisions from that. In the end, these organizations are taking a lot of risk on a business-function that their staff doesn't yet know a lot about. This is leading to more pain than even the spreadsheets were causing, and it's leading to program failure.

How does TechTrack approach the problem of complexity when deploying an ITAM solution?

KM. One of the benefits of having well over 10 years of industry experience is we know what works and what doesn't. We see firms typically coming to us after already trying other tools, and we always tell them the same thing:  first, simplify. Build business-processes that every employee can use correctly. Any technology that is deployed to facilitate ITAM needs to be end-user driven, not IT driven. Techtrack reacted to this need by developing a simple mobile (handheld-based) solution for IT Asset Tracking combined with a flexible web-based interface that basically any worker can use, and use properly. AssetManger 5.2 delivers the simplicity to allow workers to realistically capture 99 percent accuracy while still having the full suite of features to expand an Asset Management program over time

And that's really the key to conquering complexity and taking back control of the inventory. It needs to be a slow, inexorable expansion of the program over time, keeping pace with the skills and abilities of the IT workers that are using it. You have to walk before you can run, and if you aren't walking yet, you need to start because your competition already has.

BIO

Kevin McGrew has been CEO and President of TechTrack Solutions, Inc. since 1997, accumulating over a decade of experience in the IT and Fixed Asset Management markets. McGrew has worked with Fortune 1000, government, and healthcare consortiums to develop holistic, realistic approaches to IT asset management.