Pocket CIO：The Guide to Successful IT Asset Management

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Phase two – change management

This phase explains the change management process involved in tracking an IT asset. Tracking is key because every time an asset is involved in a change, whether it be a move or a re-assignment, the organization incurs an associated cost. ITAM helps determine if these changes are handled in a manner that is cost effective, business effective or, in a perfect world, both. Factors to be considered during this phase include user management.

Change is the norm in most organizations. When changes occur, however, best practices require an organization to assert control over when and where changes take place. Workplace rules and restrictions are rarely compelling enough to ensure that every employee adheres to them. However, an unwillingness to control changes in the workplace often diverts key staff away from critical tasks and diverts funding away from key business development. The most common types of changes affecting assets are:

Employee resignations/terminations
Employee job changes
Maintenance (beyond economical repair)
Employee location changes
Technology refresh
Equipment getting lost, stolen, or damaged
Equipment being re-deployed to another employee
Operational or technology shifts

Any of these changes should initiate updates to the ITAM tool (central asset repository (CAR)). This should be done prior to releasing the asset for use. The asset manager monitors the overall process, and is ultimately responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the central asset repository.

Installs, moves, adds, changes, and disposals are important tasks in any business environment. Because of this, these types of changes should be completed under the control of the organization's change management ITAM processes. In fact, many forward-thinking enterprises develop an internal process for managing these types of changes.

This process is often referred to as IMACD (Install, Move, Add or Change, Disposal). IMACD covers all day-to-day activities, including:

Installation of hardware and software
Changes to configuration
De-installation and relocation of equipment
Decommissioning of hardware and software

The objectives of these client services are to ensure that the aforementioned activities take place with a minimum disturbance of the business as usual operation. Activities concerning hardware relocation or de-installation, and changes to configurations, should be performed as scheduled and to the agreed standards, with minimum loss of end-users' productivity time. These objectives go hand-in-hand with the overall objectives of change management, so it makes sense that your IMACD process should be subordinate to your change management process. The goals of the IMACD process are:

To enable control and accountability for updating a server or end-user environment
To preplan as much as possible a change event or critical service or maintenance
To reduce the amount of shadow support within the enterprise
To build a database that helps define trends in maintenance and repairs as a feeder to the technical review process for creating catalogs of approved products

The best practice is to use these processes in determining any business benefits while demonstrating that the financial and resource costs are justified. Just be sure to include depreciation of equipment as a consideration, because equipment that is terminated within its planned lifespan often results in a higher cost.