Business Process Management and IT Asset Management

I just signed off a press release about the arrival of Vector Issue Tracker. It declares that we have taken the Census issue tracking engine developed at our Metaquest subsidiary, supplemented it with templates based on half a dozen of the most popular areas of application, and placed this business process management capability at the heart of our product strategy going forward. 

I want to focus for a minute on the statement that “With IT asset management becoming more seamlessly integrated into overall business management, Vector field engineers were finding that customers had a need to layer the capabilities of Issue Tracker onto their Vector IT Asset Management installations.”

I have always believed this was inevitable, as IT matured from being an isolated, backroom function beyond the grasp of the boardroom, to a key factor in delivering and maximizing profit and enabling business agility. But in these last five years, a significant new factor has come into play, that of corporate governance. Under this label we can collect the new legislation around accountability in areas such as security of data, (SOX, etc) and new standards such as ISO19770 on Software Asset Management.

Now, it doesn’t just matter what you do, it matters how you do it. Whether you have taken enough care over decisions that in any way affect your stakeholders, whether staff, customers, shareholders or members of the public.

The ability to show that due diligence was exercised in day-to-day decisions such as deciding which software to buy, or how to respond to the crisis when a laptop is stolen with a bunch of customer records, is important for everyone with accountability on their plates. 

I am hoping to be able to provide some real-life examples in the coming weeks. If you identify in any way with these statements, please comment or get in touch directly.