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GCN Home > 06/18/07 issue

Sum of the parts

Asset management tools help you make the most of what you have — and deliver compliance reports, too

By David Essex, Special to GCN

Information technology asset management software has been around for years. A close cousin of network management, it started as a way to “discover” and inventory hardware and software assets to better manage them. But in recent years, ITAM has evolved into the baseline data-gathering tool for much more sophisticated new methods of wringing every last dollar from investments.

ITAM is no longer just about knowing what your assets are. Corporations and government agencies increasingly use it as the foundation of a complete life cycle strategy, and ITAM vendors claim prominent customers at all levels of government.

Federal agencies also are interested in using the software to manage and document security mandates, such as the Federal Information Security Management Act, and procurement and budgetary directives such as Capital Planning and Investment Control and the Office of Management and Budget’s Exhibit 300 submissions for documenting business cases to justify IT expenditures.

“They’re really forcing people to look at not just what we’ve got but how are we using it and at the life cycle of the IT investment,” said David Yachnin, enterprise strategist at CA, an ITAM vendor. “The driving forces behind IT asset management are not just cost reduction but compliance. You literally have to spell out what you’re going to get, and then you have to track that.”

Some agencies use ITAM to create the required reports, occasionally feeding asset data into separate portfolio management tools to prepare and track business cases and IT investments. ITAM also underpins the help desks of many federal agencies, vendors say, providing the up-to-date information technicians need to respond to incidents and change requests.

“It really is an area that crosses over between operational and financial,” said Tony Myers, senior product manager at BMC Software, one of the leading vendors in combining ITAM and service-desk functions.

Specialties with a specialty
The ITAM market breaks down fairly neatly into two categories. The soup-to-nuts network management vendors — such as BMC, CA, Hewlett-Packard and IBM’s Tivoli division — occupy what is sometimes called the framework level, with complex infrastructures that can take months to implement. They usually position their product suites as IT service management.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Enterprise Architecture, IT Management, Software Applications



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