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ITAM Primer - The Program Manager's Guide to IT Asset Management

Part 6: Engineering the ITAM Program

“To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.” — Confucius

ENGINEERING THE ITAM PROGRAM



THE ITAM PROGRAM ROADMAP

ITAM Roadmap

As described earlier, ITAM is a program, not a project, and will never end. ITAM also takes some time to implement and requires a commitment to continuous improvement. The time it takes to reach early maturity levels depends on multiple factors. These factors include the number of employees, the number of assets, the number of asset types, the geographic locations of offices, and then most important, the support of the organization from top to bottom.


The roadmap defines the program's direction as improvements are made over time. A roadmap should project out at least three years and even five years. Of course, the further out the roadmap goes, the fuzzier things get. The roadmap will change over time because, let’s face it, plans change! Therefore, the roadmap should be reviewed twice a year, with the first review being more of a check and the second review is an update to the roadmap. Each milestone on the roadmap should have a project plan that includes effort, cost, and resource requirements. To justify an ITAM staff and budget, you must demonstrate the need and the benefits.
ITAM Roadmap Phases

The road to a mature ITAM Program can be long, consisting of many small and large steps. When developing the roadmap, consider grouping assets based on asset type, cost, risk, and location. This diagram shows multiple phases, each focusing on IT asset types. Again, this is just one example of a strategy.
ITAM Program Roadmap Assessment Questions

When creating a roadmap, chances are some of the items will require involvement with other departments. Is your roadmap used for educating people on the value of ITAM?

Is the roadmap influenced by IT asset types or office locations?

HOW TO START A ROADMAP

The first step in creating a roadmap is asking “where am I now?” That question is answered by creating an ITAM baseline. In the very beginning, the ITAM Program is undefined or poorly defined. Things are chaotic. Data about IT assets may be a best guess. There may be more unknowns than knowns at this stage, and both should be documented. As the program matures, the number of knowns surpasses the number of unknowns. But what should the knowns be? The first step in developing the roadmap also includes identifying the knowns in a nearly fully mature ITAM Program. This will be the goal of the ITAM Program and the direction the roadmap will take.



WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE BEGINNING OF AN ITAM PROGRAM

At the beginning of developing an ITAM Program, savings and value can be significant, and that is a good thing because it helps sell the ITAM Program to the organization. As improvements are made to the program, new baselines are conducted to measure and communicate progress. But as time passes and more improvements are made to the program, a potentially dangerous thing happens – your program becomes “boring.”



THE BORING ITAM PROGRAM

ITAM Tools

How can an ITAM Program become boring, you ask? Simple. When future baselines fail to yield huge savings and increases in value that would gain significant attention from the organization. In the following diagram is a series of baselines conducted over time. In the beginning, baselines B0 to B1 yield tremendous results, and people are impressed and excited. But sometime later, the value produced by the improvement projects seems, and is, smaller and smaller. The value Vi realized between the baselines Vi-1 and Vi is not newsworthy. This is when you know your ITAM Program has entered the “boring zone.” This period can be a significant risk to the program and the team. The value Vi created between baselines should always be reported to prevent the program from becoming expendable. But what should also be said is how far the program has come since B0, which is VT, the total value produced by the ITAM Program. The reason to report VT is to remind the organization how far the program has come and the continuously delivered value. But what is value? 
Program Baseline Assessment Questions

Do you report Vi and VT?

How complete are the baselines – are there more knowns than unknowns?

COST SAVINGS AND VALUE

Some might only be interested in cost savings, especially during a poor economy. But cost savings, or hard dollars, is not the only benefit an ITAM Program delivers. Value can sometimes be challenging to measure and not always in hard dollars. Instead, we see value as perceived or measured in soft dollars. There are many examples of value, and here are just a few.

Action Benefit
Unused hardware assets are collected and redeployed. Reuse falls under the category of cost avoidance. Unfortunately, finance does not always value cost avoidance because it does not impact the current budget.
IT standards are developed. The more homogenous the environment, the easier it is to manage. IT Security, for example, has fewer types of assets to secure, and the IT Service Desk has fewer types of assets to support.
The request and approval process is clearly defined and followed. There is higher reuse of IT assets and fewer rogue assets on the network, which benefits IT and IT Security.

These are just some examples of value the ITAM Program delivers that are difficult to express in dollars saved. Convincing people of this value may just be the most challenging task an IT Asset Manager faces.

Cost Savings and Value Assessment Questions

Has the ITAM Program reported more hard dollars or soft dollars?

Is your organization interested in soft dollars?

Does the ITAM Program effectively communicate its progress?

SPEED OF PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT

The speed at which the ITAM Program can improve depends on several factors, the most important being the support given by the organization, especially executive management. Unfortunately, most of the time, the program must prove its worth before the support is provided. Making matters more challenging is the turnover rate at the executive level. Improving the ITAM Program is more evolution than revolution. Sometimes it can be two steps forward and one step back. The speed of change can be driven by negative events such as a failed software audit or a cyber-attack. One thing is sure – the organization will not stop doing business just to wait on an ITAM Program to be installed. However, typically the approach taken is incremental improvements driven by the roadmaps.

Program Development Assessment Questions

What governs the speed of improvements to the ITAM Program?

How could improvements happen faster? More support by executives? More staff? Better cooperation from other departments?

THE ITAM PROGRAM MATURITY

Placing a number on the maturity of the ITAM Program is not easy – trust me, I’ve been thinking about this for nearly two decades. My first experience with a maturity rating came when I was in software development. That maturity model was the CMM (Capability Maturity Model from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute). The CMM is an excellent maturity model I first applied to software engineering. It was the first model I tried for ITAM, ending in a big “thud” (failure). You cannot express something as complicated as ITAM using a single vector scale of 1 to 5.

ITAM Program Maturity Model

Instead, the ITAM Program demands and deserves a model that accurately reflects the program’s complexity. I have used a radar or spider diagram like this one. What was discovered is maturity can be assigned to different perspectives of the ITAM Program. For example, the maturity of the intra-department support for the program. Imagine each axis represents a department, and the maturity represents the quality of the provided data. Revisit the IT Asset Ecosystem described earlier for more examples.


Another example is the maturity of software titles divided into groups based on cost and risk. Each of these maturity models can then be rolled up into one model. Now, executives like simple, one-digit numbers. I would strongly suggest avoiding this trap. Instead, reduce what would be considered noise (too much detail) at the executive level leaving behind the maturity rating directly impacting the business such as spending and IT security.
ITAM Program Maturity Assessment Questions

How would you express the ITAM Program’s current maturity?

Can you quantify or qualify the maturity of the cooperation of other departments?

Can you quantify or qualify the management maturity by IT asset type?

Review for Part 6: Engineering the ITAM Program

In review ….

  • A roadmap tells how the ITAM Program will mature over three to five years.
  • Starting a roadmap begins by answering the question, “Where are we today?”
  • There may be more unknowns than knowns.
  • Significant savings can be realized at the beginning of establishing an ITAM Program.
  • A boring ITAM Program is one that just works well! It is essential to remind the organization of where the ITAM Program came from.
  • Everyone expects ITAM to save the organization money, but it also creates value. Value can be expressed in both hard and soft dollars.
  • Factors including organizational commitment and external events such as a failed software audit govern the speed of developing an ITAM Program.
  • The ITAM Program is too complex to express as a single number. It is also too complex to express using a single maturity model. Several maturity ratings are recommended for department cooperation, maturity by asset type, and organizational readiness.

ITAM IQ Is Your Gateway to Modern ITAM

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Where to next?

  • ITAM and IT Security team collaborating on the best way to keep their organization's data safe.

    ITAM and Cyber Security

    We will show you how ITAM can be IT Security's proactive arm.

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