IT Asset and Service Management – conflicting objectives?

IT Asset Management and IT Service Management continue to exist as independent disciplines, serving different objectives and occasionally coming into conflict as a result. With asset management under pressure to reduce costs, and service management under pressure to maximize service availability, perhaps some tensions are inevitable.

That suggests there should be dialog to establish areas of common interest. We need to uncover opportunities for saving costs that have no negative impact on service availability. That points to finding assets that are either not contributing to service delivery, or are detracting from service delivery.

At a simple day-to-day level, an example activity would be to be continually looking for application instances that are not being used and which can be ‘harvested’ and re-allocated. Roles can change frequently for some IT users, and it is very easy for applications they relied on at one time to become redundant later on.

Role changes can also lead to ‘privilege creep’, where data access privileges become redundant through role change but are not rescinded, and steadily accumulate. So looking for instances of data access privileges falling into disuse is another activity that can yield results – tightened information security if nothing else.

Provisioning Lifecycle Management

But this is reactive, and is compensating for weaknesses in the overall governance of IT resource allocation. Does your organization have a method for accurately determining the IT resource needs throughout the user community – including hardware, access to applications, and data access privileges? Provisioning Lifecycle Management deals with this challenge by creating structured communication and workflows between all the stakeholders in IT resource provisioning. It ensures that all the appropriate contributors are involved in IT resourcing decisions, from a new hire provisioning, through role changes and finally secure termination. The resource requirement definitions that it creates then support and provide direction for the IT asset and service management activities, making cooperation in joined-up ‘ITASM’ a possibility. Take a look at Connect.