IT Asset Management Optimize Expanding Technologies and Enterprise Asset Holding ED TITTEL POWERED BY FOUNDATION EDITION IT Asset Management By Ed Tittel TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 4 Business challenges with managing assets 5 Benefits of managing all your assets 8 Managing the asset journey and lifecycle 12 Walking the asset management walk 14 Making the most of automated workflows 17 Getting assets right 20 Maturing your asset management 22 Gain influence by sharing asset data 24 Benefits of software savings: CHS 27 Optimizing all your assets on the ServiceNow Platform 29 Copyright © 2023 by Future US LLC Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America. www.actualtechmedia.com IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT III Publisher’s Acknowledgements EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Keith Ward DIRECTOR OF CONTENT DELIVERY Wendy Hernandez CREATIVE DIRECTOR Olivia Thomson SENIOR DIRECTOR OF CONTENT Katie Mohr WITH SPECIAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SERVICENOW Juliana Beauvais, Director of Product Marketing Adam Smith-Cairns, Sr. Product & Solution Marketing Manager ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ed Tittel is a 30-plus year veteran of the IT industry who writes regularly about cloud computing, networking, security, and Windows topics. Perhaps best known as the creator of the Exam Cram series of certification prep books in the late 1990s, Ed writes and blogs regularly for GoCertify.com, Win10.Guru, ComputerWorld, and other sites. For more information about Ed, including a resume and list of publications, please visit EdTittel.com. IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 4 Introduction Welcome to The Gorilla Guide® To… IT Asset Management, Foundation Edition (be sure to check out the full-length ITAM/EAM Success Gorilla Guide (second edition). IT asset management, often abbreviated as ITAM, describes what IT has, who’s using it, and what it costs. For digital busi- nesses to do well, they must manage and optimize their assets—namely, the hardware, software, and cloud infra- structure on which the business runs and works. Because the cloud is increasingly a factor in digital transformations, it continues to impact the mix of IT assets under manage- ment. That said, it’s also increasingly important to auto- mate the asset lifecycle. Managing IT assets starts with taking stock of what’s “out there” in your digital infrastructure by way of hardware, software, and cloud subscriptions—including Software as a Service (SaaS), such as Box, SAP, DocuSign, Workday, and so forth. This usually starts with the discovery of assets, iden- tification and reconciliation with licenses and subscriptions, and ownership attribution. Once you know what you’re dealing with, next moves include rationalizing and optimiz- ing investments, maintenance, and upkeep, and working through the lifecycle for all those things. Enterprise asset management, sometimes called EAM, takes another view of additional assets, namely physical business assets. EAM involves overseeing the lifecycle for physical business assets, many of which fall outside IT’s purview. IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 5 EAM has focused historically on non-digital collections, such as vehicle fleets, production equipment and infrastruc- ture, pipelines and roads, facilities, and operational tech- nology systems. Many enterprise assets also have a longer lifespan than IT assets. Because technology is ubiquitous now, IT can jump into the asset picture across the entire enterprise. IT can (and should) provide answers to questions such as: Who’s responsible for Internet of Things (IoT) as- sets? Who manages operational technology assets essential to the business? Today’s forward-looking and -thinking IT managers have what it takes—namely, tools, skills, and knowledge—to apply asset management methods and plat- forms to all kinds of technology-enabled assets. Business challenges with managing assets A closer look at asset management challenges reveals that many organizations lack a “big picture” understanding of what they’ve got, who’s using it, and how much it costs. Asset management brings all these concerns together, makes them easily visible, accessible on demand, and amenable to auto- mated control and maintenance. ITAM actually covers three subdisciplines: hardware asset management (HAM), software asset management (SAM), and cloud cost management (CCM). Because they don’t always know what they’re dealing with, organizations too often deal with assets in response to un- planned and sometimes unexpected events or problems. It IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 6 could be a reply to a user request for some software (license or subscription). It may not be obvious if the title is available; if it is, it may not be easy to figure out if a spare license or subscription is on hand or needs to be acquired. It can be a real chore to work through everything needed to honor such requests. Overig situations can be more troublesome—such as an audit from the Business Software Alliance—when a company may have to fork over millions (e.g., NASA1) to fend off licensing discrepancies or misuse. Such events often provoke panic, all-hands meetings to appoint troubleshooters, and lots of time and effort to prepare to pay the piper. Yet work must go on as usual, so IT puts in long hours and hard work to make tricky, difficult decisions. But there’s a better way to deal with such things. 1 NASA overspent $15 million on Oracle software from 2017-2022 because it feared penalties resulting from its failure to track usage. It spent an additional $20 million on fines and overpayment to other vendors as well (IBM, SUSE, and HP). https://www.cio.com/ article/419281/ In arriving at an accurate and current understanding of assets, licensing and subscription costs, and ownership or responsibility for an unexpected or unaccounted for item, organizations often find themselves confronting major gotchas. IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 7 In arriving at an accurate and current understanding of assets, licensing and subscription costs, and ownership or responsibility for an unexpected or unaccounted for item, organizations often find themselves confronting major got- chas. These include: • Wasted spending: Organizations may be paying for unused capacity. This can involve duplicate licenses or subscriptions for software or services no longer in use. Or it might involve paying for excess capacity to steer clear of trouble (as in the NASA situation). • Unnecessary and avoidable risks: Unexpected licens- es or subscriptions can indicate “shadow IT” at work (departments or branches stand up software or services without going through IT). Admins might deploy soft- ware without understanding licensing rules (these vary by publisher and circumstance, and can be tricky, espe- cially for VMs or containers in the cloud). The biggest problem is when licenses in use exceed paid-for licens- es—this can lead to fines and penalties, over and above “true-up” costs. • Made by hand: Keeping track of assets (especially soft- ware) can be tedious, time-consuming, and labor-in- tensive. Crisis management eats away at normal produc- tivity, stifles innovation, and can even cause employee retention issues. All these efforts drag on the bottom line and make asset management more expensive than it needs to be. IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 8 • Escaping investment inefficiencies: History can be a terrible burden when time-worn practices prevail, even in the face of better and more cost-efficient alternatives. So can ignorance. Contributing factors include process inefficiencies such as disconnected tools or siloed teams; missing cost visibility—no usage or consumption data, shadow IT, or app and cloud sprawl; or reactionary fire drills—low or no audit defenses, plus unbudgeted or even surprise costs weighing on the bottom line. Asset management addresses all these gotchas, and more, as you’ll see in the next section. Benefits of managing all your assets Upon closer examination, asset management consists of a set of practices built around record keeping and maintenance. That is, asset management involves documenting contracts, discovery and inventory, and tracking related finances. Thus, asset management includes all contracts for licenses and ser- vices in a single, coherent, and intelligible way. Asset man- agement also looks out into organizational networks to find, identify, and compile a complete list of what’s in use, who’s using found items, what for, how long, and so on. IT ASSE T M A NAGEMENT 9 Finally, asset management tracks financials around discov- ered or supplied items. These include costs of acquisition, licenses, upgrades, maintenance, and more. By assembling these three collections of data, asset management provides a truthful, current snapshot of assets across the whole organi- zation. This helps reduce costs, align asset investments with business goals, eliminate waste, and improve utilization. Another benefit of asset management comes from eliminat- ing overspending. A recent Gartner Inc. study reports that organizations that “fail to attain centralized visibility and coordinate SaaS life cycle will overspend … by at least 25% …” on related software or services costs. At the same time, they’re spending over $1,000 per employee per year for Gartner International Data Corporation – IDC Gartner Gartner $8.4M $10M Hardware Budget 21% Software Budget 25% IT Budget 4% $40M Customer revenue $1B Average of 7-10% spending waste on hardware assets (Conservatively 7%) Why manage all your technology & enterprise assets? First Year HAM Practice ROI $588K Estimates of 30% savings first year, 5% annually. (Conservatively 10%) First Year SAM Practice ROI $1M Figure 1: For every $1 billion of customer revenue, roughly 4% to 6% goes to the IT budget. Of that $40 million at the low end, 25% is usually spent on software.