Movie no.3 on this series is… Kick Ass! You have seen the movie, right? Come on, if you haven’t, you are really missing something. Anyways, what I really like about this movie is that Kick Ass is a super hero but not really. Kick Ass is just a normal kid who wants to be a “real-life superhero” and wants to help people in trouble. He does not have any super powers, does not “spin a web”, and is not from some other planet, etc… you get the point! Heroes are about the spirit and not really about super-powers!
No, this is not an appeal to all the IT Asset Managers to become a vigilante. If you already are, that’s cool! You can have a MySpace Facebook page where people can… Oops, got carried away! As I was saying, to be a superhero, you can start by being a superhero at work. Be Kick Ass.
Four steps of becoming a superhero at your workplace:
1. Identify your calling
As an IT Asset Manager, your objective could be anywhere from saving the cost to the company to protecting your company from potential lawsuits. Breaking down this core objective, you can have many small objectives – identifying prohibited software in your network, loss/theft of an IT asset, keeping track of PO’s & contracts, and renewing contracts at the right time, etc… (this would vary from organization to organization).
2. Identify the offender and intervene
Once you have identified the objective, you need to separate the evil from good. Find out who the culprit is and intervene. In your case, you can find out who is using prohibited or unlicensed software and shoot a mail or go up to that person and tell him your concerns. The “enemy” could also be a vendor who is not giving you a great support/ products. If you had the right tool you would know all that through reports and dashboards.
3. Get a great tool
Kick Ass had a MySpace page, in your case this may not be really helpful as it is not often someone would tell you about prohibited software being used on a workstation, you just have to do it yourself. You need to have a tool that constantly scans your network, lists the inventory and updates it whenever there is a change. This will be your “MySpace” “Facebook” page… sort of! AssetExplorer can be that tool. Give it a try!
4. Help people and make them your fans
Be it the victim (your IT dept) or the bystanders, they will love you when you do the right thing. Imagine yourself, being able to churn out reports within minutes, for your CIO, baam! FAN! Being able to help the purchase department make the right purchasing decisions in regards to hardware and software, baam! FAN! As for the employees, if you can fix the problems proactively and ensure you provide them with software licenses as and when they need (of course, after proper approvals), then they become your fans too!
Go forth and be Kick Ass! Try AssetExplorer .
Other related posts from this series:
Stop being the ‘Screaming Jerry Maguire’
A tip from Scrat[Ice Age] on CMDB
Cheers
Joe
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