Create a mobile IT asset management framework to reduce risk, decrease costs and increase the scalability of your IT organization.
In the first post of this series, the following three questions were posed:
- How many laptops and smartphones does your company have in use right now?
- Do you know where they are?
- Do you know what information is stored on them?
Unfortunately, an alarmingly high number of IT organizations are unable to answer these seemingly simple questions. Why: because it is hard. Hard, under-the-covers work that no one wants to do, and everyone else assumes you are already doing. However, if IT cannot answer these questions, the organization is at risk, costs are leaking and your platform can’t effectively scale – all things both you and the board do not want to hear.
How to solve this problem? As we discussed in the first post, humble yourself and come to grips that you don’t know what you don’t know. Then, start the process of implementing a Mobile IT Asset Management Framework.
How does one do this? Answer: start simple. Peter Kretzman has a great post on how to get started. He is spot on that 80% of the issue can be resolved with a spreadsheet and some elbow grease. However, if the organization is growing rapidly, is highly mobile or carries around a lot of confidential data, you’ll need to put a more robust process in place to cover things like procurement, security, tracking and asset decommissioning.
Below is a sample framework that we developed internally – there are no flashes of brilliance here, and most folks in IT are keenly aware of all of these areas. However, we view this as one consolidated business process, rather than a series of functions that operate in a silo, and therefore have been able to use it as a roadmap to execute against as we grow:
Note: putting this all together into one seamless business process is not something to tackle overnight – this is a journey, not a destination. Also, some of this may be overkill for your organization if you don’t have assets spread out around the world, or if you don’t have a lot of sensitive information on said assets.
However, if you are operating in a global, mobile or virtual environment where the user, the vendor and IT support all take place in different countries, then a more robust mobile asset strategy may be appropriate for you and your organization.
In general, the framework above is built around standardization and automation. Standardize the polices, processes and hardware, then automate the routine transactions and handoffs wherever possible. In this example, policies and processes are exposed as a service to the end user, and on the bottom, a transaction and workflow tool stores, tracks and automates key handoffs. The “tool” can be as simple as a shared Excel file or as robust as a ITIL-based Service Management Platform.
While this framework and all of the associated effort may seem ‘heavy”, your desktop platform is similar to the foundation of your house: if it is solid, you can confidentially build on top of it. If it is shaky, then everything on top of it is wobbly and you never know when it will all come crashing down. No matter the size of your organization, a standardized and automated process around the management of mobile IT assets is really important to long term, sustainable success.
Unfortunately, you won’t get any credit for all of this under-the-covers type work. The best you can hope for is that people get their stuff when they need it, the risk of an embarassing data breach is dramatically reduced, costs stay under control and you have more time to work on the cool stuff. Pretty good trade off if you ask me.
In future posts, we’ll break down each of the six components of the framework into more detail and provide some actionable advice to get started building your own mobile asset management success story!
