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Cover Story
IT is Not a Cost Center - IT Financial Management and Cost Recovery
By: Patricia Genetin, CPA & Principal Consultant for CA Inc. and David Messineo, Practice Director for CA Inc.
Challenge
Understanding IT costs and effectively applying IT chargeback and cost recovery methods tends to be daunting from both the practical and organizational standpoints. Many IT organizations lack the formal policies and procedures required to understand the true cost of an asset or service, and in many cases, are not given the budgets to do so due to limited resources. However, as good governance initiatives promote tighter financial responsibility and IT transforms into a customer-focused service provider, the need for better consideration of the factors driving technology decisions and formal cost recovery methodologies continues to grow. Read More...
Feature Article
Avoid the CIO’s Knife - Reducing Financial Risk: The Case for Entitlement-Centric Software License Management
By: Christof Beaupoil, Managing Partner of Aspera GmbH
Maintaining global license and software inventories as the basis for strategic software license management
The recession has put a magnifying glass on everything viewed as an expense. IT is under pressure to keep costs in check and many CIOs are yielding a sharp knife to cut software costs, which comprise roughly 20 percent of the average IT budget. Transparent cost charging methods are extremely important to keeping expenditures visible and manageable. This, however, can be particularly difficult when software is the source of the cost. Read More...
Hardware Savings Detective - 10 Ways to Drive Down the Hardware Cost at the Desktop
By: Jenny Schuchert, Education Specialist for IAITAM
Financial management for IT asset management is a busy job, requiring vigilance and a detective’s eye for the clues to better financial performance. At any time, established sources of savings can stop delivering those savings, necessitating finding an alternative strategy. My favorite example of savings failure happened to a technology organization that developed an extensive online catalogue with a vendor so that employees could select what they needed and the price was already negotiated. The program worked well for some time, but the IT asset management team forgot to pay attention to current prices. They were embarrassed to find out that they were actually paying higher than current pricing and wasting money rather than saving it. Read More...
Review Those Invoices! - Invoice Reconciliation Leads to Savings
By: Barbara Rembiesa, President of IAITAM
Financial Management is the focus of this month’s Quick Success Project, and is one of the areas within an ITAM program that can quickly recoup savings for an organization. Most C-level managers look towards some sort of financial payback to any new program implementation, and many view ITAM as a cost instead of a savings generator for the organization. This QSP article presents just one area where you can produce measurable financial payback and savings into the organization. Read More...
Play Hide & Seek - One Organization’s Journey to an Accurate Baseline Inventory
By: Ilan Justh, IT Asset Manager and Software Licensing Expert
So what do you do when you have been tasked with finding all of the needles in a BIG corporate haystack? I say, "Grab a strong magnet and get to work on counting". I was hired as the first asset manager at a major art institute a few years back. One of the first tasks I had to accomplish was creating a master CMDB of every technical asset owned by the organization. The first step was to determine what we wanted to track. I convened a meeting with the network guys, a representative from telecom, and my direct manager. Did we want to track mice, external drives, keyboards, and sound related items (speakers, microphones, etc.)? That was easy, we said '"no" to all of these devices. Did we want to monitor monitors? We went back and forth and voted 'no' to this one too. You might wonder why we made this particular decision. We came to a consensus that almost every deployed unit was a CRT and worth less than $150. They were not only below our financial threshold, but usually not worth repairing in case of failure. (Note that this was back in 2004 when flat panels were still the exception rather than the norm - it was only in 2005 that we decided to switch to that format.) That didn't leave much for us to inventory. We basically had to track CPUs, printers and select externals such as scanners (laptops of course being lumped into the first category). Telecom told us that we didn't need to worry about their stuff, but the network guys asked to have all their servers, routers, switches, hubs, etc. included. Read More...
In The Beginning – Policies and Procedures, the Prequel to Asset Management
By: Shawn Mayhew, Software Asset Manager for CAISO
The goal for all asset managers is to manage all of our IT assets. Lets think of all IT assets such as; desktops, laptops, monitors, printers, servers, routers, switches, copiers, and software. Inventory or asset tracking of network assets is very easy to do with products like Altiris. By deploying such a tool, it also assists the asset manager in attaining the ultimate goal of management of all the stated IT assets. Read More...
The KOALA Factor – A Pragmatist’s Guide to Structuring IT Asset Data
By: Scott Parkin, VP of Information Technology for Avocent LANDesk
At the core of every task is relevant data. To effectively plan, execute, and report on critical business activities you need quick and effective access to the right key facts.
This is a challenge for any business manager, but is especially difficult for IT asset managers where key asset data is spread across multiple applications, departments, disciplines, and sources. The IT asset manager needs to aggregate, analyze, and act on data from Purchasing, Finance, IT, Service Desk, Facilities, Security, Operations, Human Resources and others, and may be pulling data from spreadsheets, expert financial systems, word processing documents, PDFs, drawing or modeling tools, and even handwritten notes. Read More...
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