Creating an Asset Management process

This recipe will provide steps for creating a sample Asset Management process.

Getting ready

For this recipe, the authors recommend you read up on the difference between asset inventory and asset management as an organizational process.

How to do it...

Asset Management is a life cycle process, which tracks an IT asset with its associated financial data from when the asset is requested to when the asset is retired, as shown in the following figure:

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An example of the steps for creating an Asset Management process is as follows:

1. Agree and document the organization's asset management policy.
2. Document the operational process to support the asset management policy.
3. Create and assign people roles to manage the process. At a minimum, you should plan to include the following:
   • Hardware Asset Managers
   • Hardware Asset Inventory agents
   • Software Asset Managers
   • Software Asset Inventory agents
4. Identify and agree on an asset register management system. An asset register in its basic form is a manual process. In advanced scenarios, you may be able to automate this process with a tool such as a bar-code scanner. It should capture the following:
   • Capture the IT asset type
   • Capture financial information
   • Align the IT asset to its financial data
   • Capture the input to a Configuration Management system (CMS)
   • Continually aligned to the CMS
5. Implement Asset Management in SCSM using one of the following methods:
   • Manually extend the Configuration Items (CI) class to include financial data for assets
   • Purchase an asset management solution for SCSM (for example, Provance IT Asset Management Pack for SCSM or Cireson Asset Management)
6. Continually review the policy and operational process. The goal of this step is to improve the process and ensure compliance.

How it works...

Asset Management begins and ends with people and ultimately can cost or add value to a business. A non-IT related analogy is the lessons from retail stock takes, which typically happen annually. The stock take is the best opportunity for a retail shop to get the most accurate figure for its profit or loss on stock. Two forms of lost revenues are as follows:

• Damaged goods
• Missing goods

IT asset management is the stock take required for all your technological assets, and its resultant analysis for intelligent decision making to provide factual compliance measurements. The IT equivalent of the stock take process is referred to as audits for software and hardware. SCSM with partner extensions or in-house authoring provides 80 % of the Asset Management for the organization. People and process critically account for the high value of 20 percent.

There's more...

There are various tools (products) labeled as Asset Management tools. The true Asset Management tools should have the capability of tracking assets from order to decommissioning, and in some cases, recommissioning.

Asset Management is an end-to-end process, and the tools are enablers of successful implementation. Successful Asset Management organization programs recognize the full life cycle management of assets.

See also

See the Using the SCSM Authoring Tool and Extending Service Manager classes recipes in Chapter 11, Extending SCSM with Advanced Personalization, for advanced recipes on management pack authoring.