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 As enterprise-class IT evolves, one core area in which it must achieve increasing success is asset management. Maximizing business value from the broad array of IT technologies typically in place requires comprehensive tracking and monitoring; only in this way can the enterprise ensure that it is delivering satisfactory levels of performance throughout every stage of the lifecycle, and that assets are utilized suitably in the pursuit of business goals.
Furthermore, asset management in the IT space has developed as a field to the point where business intelligence and asset information can be combined more effectively than ever before—and the business bottom line is the ultimate beneficiary. IT managers, for instance, can utilize asset management tools to track inventory and ascertain that technical resources are deployed appropriately. Software asset managers can more easily resolve software licensing issues—an increasingly complex and thorny area in which the failure to achieve success can result in the violation of federal law. Purchasing and financial managers are empowered through modern asset management tools to track asset costs, analyze the return on asset investment, create accurate forecasts, and quantify purchasing levels accordingly.
In this way, asset management as a field, and asset management solutions as implementation tools, can enhance the enterprise through maximizing performance and lifetime business value of all assets. Yet this utopian vision of holistic asset management is threatened by numerous significant challenges. These include compliance issues, which can touch on regulatory, environmental, and safety subtopics; insufficient visibility and control of assets, to optimize their impact on business operations; organizational and technological convergence, which can be difficult to achieve given the siloed design which characterizes many enterprises; and the ongoing need to maximize efficiency while also minimizing total cost of ownership.
IBM’s Asset Management Solution Is Both Holistic and Unified
For these reasons, IBM offers the industry’s most comprehensive asset and financial management solution—the only unified solution available which addresses key areas of asset, service, and change and configuration, for all enterprise assets, both in and out of the IT space. Built on Tivoli's process automation engine, and informed by IBM service management best practices, this solution delivers best-in-class features and functionality, yet also includes extraordinary depth within asset and industry subgroups.
The IBM solution, unlike competing offerings, spans both enterprise asset management and IT asset management, improving both through cross-communication and a single interface. In addition, a key IT-centric tool in this solution portfolio is IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager. This tool is designed to help the enterprise track IT costs with far greater granularity and specificity than ever before.
Accurate cost-tracking of shared resources—clearly a primary requirement of any successful asset management strategy—can be particularly challenging in today’s complex IT environments, such as modern datacenters, where myriad IT services are delivered by way of hundreds or thousands of servers. Establishing dollar figures for the IT costs generated by users, groups, projects, or business units can be extremely difficult, and that difficulty increases still further given the increasing use of virtualization in datacenters (since many virtual servers may exist on a single physical server).
IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager rises to this shared resource cost-tracking challenge by collecting relevant data, analyzing it, generating reports, and billing in a wide variety of ways as determined by the resources consumed. For example, at an organizational level, costs can be tracked by IT project or hierarchical group. Alternately, costs associated with a business process such as a composite application can be similarly isolated. Such detailed information can, in turn, yield essential intelligence required to optimize IT business value by establishing and quantifying both the fiscal investment and the return on that investment by department, business unit, or product line.
Asset Management Information Can Be Utilized to Create Business Value in Many Ways
Just as IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager tracks IT costs, so asset tracking through the IT lifecycle is managed by another solution: IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT. This product, which covers all IT assets whether hardware or software, can help simplify licensing complexities, enable compliance initiatives, improve IT service levels, and ultimately align IT with business goals by ensuring that assets are deployed properly and perform as expected. Inventory, financial, maintenance, procurement, and contract management information are all integrated into a holistic platform accessed through a straightforward Web-based interface. This optimized interface has been specifically designed for ease of use, and can be modified to address many different classes of business workflows, ensuring the right people have the right access to the right information.
The business benefits of the tool are considerable. Consider, for instance, the relationship between licensing, procurement, and compliance in the context of deployed software. By tracking licenses more effectively, the tool simultaneously informs managers where software is required, helps to ensure that compliance initiatives are achieved by specifying the number of missing licenses, and assists cost controls and forecasting by informing purchasing managers how much must be spent in order to obtain those licenses.
Similarly, the possibility of overprovisioning, and the unfortunate needless expenses that come as a consequence, can be anticipated and avoided—directly benefiting the business bottom line. Managing IT Assets through their full lifecycle (plan, acquire, deploy, manage, and retire) is a process that touches many people in different departments throughout an organization.
One of the great strengths of the Tivoli Asset Management for IT offering is the ability to easily configure the user interface to present the information that each individual needs to do their job, and more importantly, the ability to easily create the appropriate workflows to the next stage of the process. Having the capability to define and adjust a tight IT Asset Management process with no ‘lost handoffs’ is essential to achieving optimal cost control and service level improvement.
The business wins delivered by IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT don’t stop there. As only one element that uses IBM Tivoli's process automation engine, IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT integrates seamlessly and effectively with other solutions; key information it provides can be of direct utility in other business contexts altogether.
The relationship between IT asset information and service desk troubleshooting, for example, is a powerful one. Service desk personnel attempting to resolve technical problems require accurate, up-to-the-minute information about the problematic technologies involved in order to minimize resolution time and ensure that the resolution is correct and comprehensive.
Such information is available through asset management solutions. If a replacement product is required, inventory can be checked, and end users can be informed of the expected delay before the replacement is deployed. Similarly, asset managers can, in many cases, profit from data collected through service calls; as a particular class of asset is repeatedly proven unreliable or unsuitable, for instance, it can be replaced through subsequent procurements.
Just such a mutually beneficial exchange of key information can be obtained through the direct integration available between IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT and IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager, IBM’s solution that supports the ITIL processes of Incident, Problem, Change, Release, SLA, Configuration, and Availability.
Thus, the best-in-class features and functionality provided by the unified IBM Tivoli asset management platform helps the enterprise achieve higher IT service levels, reduce costs, simplify compliance, and maximize the business value delivered by all IT assets, at every stage in the IT service lifecycle.
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