STORY: “Hannah and the Case of the Missing Hardware Assets”
_____________________________________
Chapter 1 – And the Journey (and Normalization) begins…*
Over the past two years, BrambleStatic* has done a good job maintaining a clean and accurate CMDB. Since the Configuration Items (CIs) were created from Discovery, integrations to other tools, imports, and also manually entered, it is hard for Hannah, the IT Asset Manager, to know what assets are the same as other assets and then to know the important lifecycle dates for all these matched devices.
This ability to see lifecycle dates is very important for Hannah because she needs to know when to tell teams to make decisions about continuing to use these devices – from purchasing extended support all the way to permanently stopping the use of these assets.
A closer look at this:
• Most employees have a laptop.
• The asset data has 1000 hardware models associated to these laptops. Hannah knows they haven’t used 1000 different laptop models.
Hannah and her team started to manually group hardware models together using different hardware model records, but it turns out that they are actually the same exact laptop product. This group of hardware models would all have the same lifecycle. They researched the important dates for this laptop product and manually entered those dates on each of the hardware models.
There is no way they could keep up the manual work. The time it would take to do this for all of their hardware models is simply not realistic, especially when you consider the thousands of datacenter server, storage and network device models that would need to be looked at later. And by the time they finished, the data would be outdated and would need additional research and updating. The employees on Hannah’s team doing this work were tired and unhappy.
Hannah recognized this was not sustainable. Automation was the only answer.
Hardware Model Normalization and the Content Library were implemented.
With Hardware Model Normalization, hardware models created for CIs/Assets in BrambleStatic’s* environment are automatically standardized and grouped together.
• The small set of laptop hardware models that Hannah’s team took weeks to group together were automatically and quickly grouped together under a normalized product record.
• There were hardware models her team had completely missed. These were automatically included in the group.
• And this normalization is done every time a hardware model record is created or updated as well as through a regularly scheduled job.
No more manual grouping. But what about the lifecycle dates?
The Content Library continually brings in manufacturer lifecycle information for hardware models. It is updated every 7 days. This lifecycle information is automatically assigned to the product record and then distributed to all the hardware models that were grouped together.
No more time wasted researching how to group hardware models and lifecycle dates from all the different manufacturers for all the different models. No more manual grouping of models together and no more manual entry of manufacturer lifecycle dates.
This was a huge win for Hannah and her team. And all she had to do was use Hardware Model Normalization and the Content Library. She knew they weren’t using 1000 different models of laptops, but she couldn’t prove that before. Now that all these hardware models have been normalized, she finds they have slightly over 30 different models of laptops. That makes a lot more sense to Hannah!
Automated normalization with continuously updated content information = a huge time savings and a happier ITAM team!!! And a happier Hannah!
Stay tuned for Hannah’s next step on the HAM journey: the scary world of inventorying stockrooms, data centers, and offices, oh my!!!!
For more information on Hardware Asset Management, go to servicenow.com/HAM
_________________________________________________________________
*The details of the company described in this story are fictional and only represent the profile of a Fortune 500 company. The details are not indicative of any existing company, past or present.
