By John Emmitt
Vince Vaughn has a new movie that came out recently called Unfinished Business, and the promotional campaign included having the cast making some hilarious “stock photos”, such as the one above. (Caveat—they may only be hilarious if you are in marketing). The film's synopsis starts out with: "What began as a routine business trip goes off the rails in every imaginable—and unimaginable—way….”
Hardware Asset Management (HAM) may not have been able to save Vince’s business trip (or even the movie, which seems to have had a very short run in the movie theaters) but it could help your organization in a lot of ways. (And you were wondering how I was going to tie HAM to the movie). One example was discussed in the previous blog on this topic—reclaiming licenses for software running on hardware assets that are being retired. Here are a couple of other examples:
Know when devices are missing—HAM tools allow you to take proactive steps when devices are missing for some specified number of days. “Missing” in this case means that the device has not been reported in inventory. Typically, inventory is collected by organizations at least on a weekly basis. One customer found that hardware that went missing was being sold on eBay! Don’t let that be your organization.
Management Dashboard showing devices missing for over 60 days
Reallocate assets assigned to terminated employees and contractors—just as with the reclamation of software licenses for retired hardware assets, organizations need to have processes in place to track, reclaim and reallocate hardware assets that are assigned to employees that leave the company.
Clearly, organizations need to have processes and policies in place to manage hardware assets; a tool by itself is not enough. Here are two more examples of policies for hardware asset management:
Asset Receiving Process—when assets are ordered through the procurement system, PO data is imported into asset management tool and all hardware asset information is imported into the asset management tool within 5 days of physical receipt.
Hardware Refresh Policy—all desktop and laptop devices will be refreshed every 3 years and all servers will be refreshed every 4 years. All software licenses allocated to the machines being retired must be reviewed and reclaimed where possible.
Hardware asset management (as well as software asset management) is not without some new challenges. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and corporate owned mobile devices mean that there is now a mix of employee owned and corporate mobile devices for many people in the organization. Both can have corporate owned applications running on them, and/or allow employees to access virtual applications and virtual desktops. Tracking mobile devices requires the ability to collect inventory for these hardware assets. One of the ways to do this is through tools such Microsoft ActiveSync and System Center. (FlexNet Manager Platform can import mobile device hardware data from these tools, for example). There are also Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools available from companies such as AirWatch (now part of VMware).
Is your organization doing everything that needs to be done to manage the full range of hardware assets? Or, do you have unfinished business when it comes to HAM?
To learn more about the hardware asset management capabilities of FlexNet Manager Platform, please visit our website.