Continuing the relate-movie-to-ITAM series that I started with ” CMDB Tip from Scrat (ICE AGE )” last month, here is another one, from another good movie that I like. Jerry Maguire. No, I’m not gonna talk about “you complete me. So Assets complete you!”… Blah!. This phrase is a from a very popular scene from Jerry Maguire, which I saw for the nth time: “Show me the money”
Recently when I thought of IT asset managers and their willingness, but lack of knowledge of the power they have, to contribute to an organization’s growth, I thought of Jerry Maguire. You know, the screaming Jerry Maguire! If you are the kind of person who is eager to deliver value or contribute to your organization income, and in your mind you are screaming “Show me the money”, stop yelling. The money is right there, staring at your face. Yes, I’m sure you guessed it right – your IT assets. They are called assets and not liabilities for one simple reason – they add value and all you have to do is recognize it. The assets are your way to save dollars. Dollars saved is dollars earned, that’s how the phrase goes when it comes to IT departments. But you need to know what and how to do so.
Know your inventory
Maintain a well organized database of all the IT assets, be it in-store, in-use, retired etc. This will help you with your future purchasing decisions. When a new employee joins and you are asked to deliver a PC or some asset, from a click you should have the ability to see if you have the asset in store or if you need to order, in which case you will have a lead time and inform the HR department.
License noncompliance costs more
By IT assets I mean both hardware and software, what is one without the other. Make sure your software licenses are compliant. This saves time during audits and you do not have to be worried about such audits if you have a weekly report in your hand on your software compliance. Getting caught unawares during an audit could be both embarrassing and quite expensive.
Understand the ‘Total Cost of Ownership’ of your IT assets
Generate reports on history, total cost of ownership, contracts and vendor relationship. This way you will know the real cost of your assets, you can make better informed decisions on which assets to buy and which to avoid and same goes for vendors too. This can be understood in-depth through IT Asset Life-Cycle Management (ITALM).
So, before you start yelling ‘show me your money’, stop and look around, it’s right there!
cheers
Joe
Related Read: ITAM – a key step in reducing operations costs
