Disaster Recovery Planning Next Generation – This Time with ITAM

One of my questions I would ask asset managers is about their involvement in their organization’s disaster recovery planning. Unfortunately, out of the hundreds of asset managers I asked, almost no one was involved. My follow-on research revealed that most DRP was focused on restoring the key business systems as soon as possible. Anything outside of key business systems would be addressed when ‘it’ happened.

There was one asset management group that did do it right and to this day is by far the best example of ITAM’s participation in DRP. An office building caught fire and before the fire was extinguished, all of the IT assets necessary to continue that site’s normal business operations the next day had been shipped. The ITAM team was “matter-of-fact” when they told this story, but it was anything but standard operating procedure for the majority of organizations. This is quintessential ITAM!

ITAM’s charter is to maximize the value of IT while minimizing the risk. One responsibility is to know where all assets are and who is using them. The lack of this information was evident in many organizations that suddenly found themselves scrambling to support the stay-at-home workforce. Organizations did not know what excess inventory they had or what the at-home worker needed to do their job. And I wonder how well organizations did tracking what was shipped and how well prepared they are for future off-boarding and technology refreshes of this new work-from-home paradigm.

COVID-19 has provided us with several opportunities to learn from past mistakes. Will ITAM now be a critical component of DRP for the organization’s entire IT ecosystem?