Asset Management

I was going to write something about the presidential debate, but one sentence sums it up...  Obama got Mitt-slapped.

Moving on to asset management.  I've found asset management to be something that must be kept up with on a daily basis, otherwise it becomes such a giant headache that it's impossible to deal with.  Right now, I'm in that position.  We use SysAid, which is some pretty good software that is sitting on old hardware and I'm pretty sure the raid-array has gone bad.  But I don't know anything about Windows Server 2003, so I haven't built a new SysAid Server.  But that's neither here nor there.

The point I was trying to make was that SysAid could handle all the assets we have, and handle it well.  The only problem is that I'm behind the power curve, and I'm not technically responsible for asset management.  I've got enough jobs on my plate without trying to fix the asset management system as well.  Now, where do you start with some colossal mess?  The answer to that question is anywhere.  Just start it.  

It's a long, drawn out project that simply requires man hours to fix, and there is no such thing as man hours in the IT world.  It's all just work.  I'm sure our location is like many, in that there is no such thing as downtime.  There is always something new and impressive to do, and it needs to be done yesterday. 

So asset management falls to the back of the bus.  But why do you want to do asset management anyways if you haven't been doing it before?  My answer is to track problem equipment some place other than the brain of an IT person.  The brain of an IT person has enough junk running through it on a daily basis that filling it with ridiculousness and old problems just isn't worth the effort.  Computers are good at solving problems and remembering things, so make it a habit to get the computer to remember the problem, not the person. 

With proper asset management, you have a way to track all that broken junk and identify the problem pieces of equipment and get them out of service.  There's no need to keep repairing the same piece of equipment over and over and over again.  Sure, IT is generally salaried, but time is better spent doing things other than repairing the same stupid register.  Get rid of it.  Lost business and revenue because that one piece of equipment is in the shop every week for a year is more than the piece of equipment is generally worth.

But how do you convince people the problem is really with that piece of equipment and lost time/effort amounted to enough work to warrant replacement?  Simple: asset management produces a paper trail.  And if you can show how often a piece of expensive equipment is broke, and how long it takes to fix, then you've won half the battle of getting the device replaced.  Use the tools you have at hand, and create a paper trail with asset management.