A Lean Approach To Getting Started With ITAM

[stephenmann]

This blog (and its follow up) has been contributed by Martin Thompson of The ITAM Review ...

In this blog I hope to answer a number of questions raised during my IT Asset Management (ITAM) best practices session at Knowledge14.

In summary, the ITAM key concerns from ServiceNow customers were:

1. "How do I get started," and
2. "I'm a bit afraid to switch on ITAM within ServiceNow for fear of the fire hose of data."

Embarking on ITAM can certainly feel like opening Pandora's Box when you first get started due to the enormity of the challenge, the complexity of modern assets, and the sheer volume of data.

But ITAM is a beast that can be tamed. And a recent ITAM Review salary survey suggests closer alignment between ITAM and It service management (ITSM). With it becoming less of a financial and audit function to more of an important part of the ITSM lifecycle.

So how do I get started?

The advice I shared during my session at Knowledge14 was to:

• Don't try to boil the ocean - severely limit scope to ensure success
• Focus on end outcomes and what "compliant" or "measured" actually looks like
• Practice continual service improvement in ITAM.

A copy of my slide deck can be found on Slideshare here.

How do you eat an elephant? Piece by piece

In terms of building the business case and implementing an ITAM practice, I recommend borrowing some concepts from Lean and Agile. Rather than a grand project implementation, focus on short, data-driven, incremental improvements.

This experimental, data-driven approach is likely to be much more credible that going cap-in-hand to senior management asking for several hundred thousand dollars to build an IT project rocket ship based on assumptions of potential savings made by analyst firms.

Eric Ries in his book the Lean Startup says:

"If startups invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need of large amounts of initial project funding and excessive launches and failures."

Whilst the focus of Eric's book is primarily aimed at startup software companies — we can apply the same methodology to building ITAM services.

Applying Lean to ITAM

To maximize the credibility and longevity of your ITAM practice you should run it like a business;

• "These are the services we are going to provide as part of the ITAM practice"
• "This is what these services will provide in terms of value"
• "This is how much they will cost and aim to achieve."

For example, you might start by building a service that states: Our ITAM function will deliver inventory of our entire server estate with 95% accuracy and manage the license compliance position of three major vendors in the datacentre. Is this a comprehensive ITAM practice? No. But will this very tight scope allow you to begin making progress? Yes. Our goal will be to reduce the risk of audits with those three publishers and save money by only buying exactly what we need. Using real data and results from our initial experiment you can expand your ITAM practice.

"Minimal viable service"

Eric also uses the concept of a "minimal viable product" (MVP). Which is a "version of a new product which allows the team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort".

We can also borrow this MVP concept when building an ITAM practice. We can build a minimal viable service. Our goal is to try small, incremental projects that allow us to collect data and deliver a return, which allows building credibility and momentum in the practice.

In a follow-up blog, I'll cover seventeen ideas that can be considered minimal viable ITAM services to tackle, to start showing a return from ITAM. Each one of these could potentially be implemented in isolation, and most of them just require some human horsepower to deliver rather than major organizational change.

 
Finally, my time at Knowledge14 is encapsulated in:

• Knowledge14, steal like an artist,
• Live from Knowledge14 — ServiceNow previews Kanban visual task boards

Image source: Flickr: bdesham's Photostream