One of the toughest things to achieve in successful IT asset management is continuous accurate data. Without it however, systems rapidly become redundant as users don’t believe in the data and operators stop using and maintaining systems properly.

The UK is now fairly mature in the sense of discovery tools, just as France and Germany are in the use of asset lifecycle databases (mainly due the historic tax breaks involved). In most countries the drive to IT service management improvement and the desired active use of configuration management / CMDB is also driving the need for better asset management practices. After all, how can IT service management and impact analysis work if the underlying asset infrastructure is not fully understood?

However, despite increasing maturity, many organisations miss a trick. In much of Europe there is still little use of physical asset tracking techniques, despite the availability of mature barcoding and exciting new RFID technology and the critical part this can play in maintaining asset information.

This is particularly useful at goods in, driving lifecycle status changes, confirming job completion and verifying assets against a ‘known’ condition maintained for example in CMDB.

Imagine the following. As the asset is received it’s make, model and serial number are captured, as is the PO, both of which are usually present in barcode form on the ‘brown box’.

Once the asset is created and logged as ‘in stores’, the barcode reader can be used as the unit goes through commissioning, testing and deployment phases – even capturing crucial information on deployment to DR, test or production environments.

The fully customisable workflow embedded on the readers is then used to drive moves, adds, disposals and changes during the main life of the asset and RFID can be used to verify the allocation or presence of the assets, even just by walking through the room with the assets present.

Anomalies are flagged and used by asset, change or configuration management administrators to maintain the various data sources. Such maintenance can even be coded into the workflow process to make it virtually self policing.

Finally, physically collected data is linked through to discovery data, given a 360 degree view of the asset, ensuring that CMDB or asset repository information remains highly current and accurate – and at the same time cutting out vast amounts of paperwork and human error.

All this can be driven directly from simple workflow embedded in a PDA based barcode or RFID reader, and such technology is mature, flexible and relatively low cost

For more information on how ITAMS can help you create a Barcoding and Physical IT Asset Tracking solution to fit your requirements, please
contact us or call ITAMS on 08704 050508.