How to cover your IT assets

By David Braue, ZDNet Australia
18 November 2004 08:54 AM
Tags: asset, asset management, itil
Australian ITIL


Contents
Introduction
Benefits and implications
The push to centralise
Australian ITIL
AAD sheds light on frozen assets
Executive summary

Once you've got that management in place, how do you turn it into business advantage? The answer will come as a growing number of tools begin incorporating the precepts of the IT Infrastructure Library model to tie their improving asset management capabilities to specific business objectives.

ITIL has five core elements: business perspective, application management, service delivery, service support, and infrastructure management. These are elucidated by ITIL to give clear guidance for making, managing and monitoring service management policies.

"IT groups inside companies see ITIL as a standardised way of aligning themselves better with what the business is trying to do with IT."

-- Jason Andrews, BMC
The ITIL model includes the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), a centralised asset registry that correlates infrastructure performance to business service goals. By combining all relevant information into this, ITIL seeks to eliminate the silos of asset management information. CMDB provides philosophical guidance for the appropriate structure of consolidated asset databases.

"IT groups inside companies see ITIL as a standardised way of aligning themselves better with what the business is trying to do with IT," says Jason Andrew, director of service management for BMC, which recently released a consolidated CMDB tool designed to wrap together the information collection and management capabilities of BMC's enterprise management technologies.

"Many companies talk about ROI and understanding the TCO of their assets, but you have to ask how they can do that if they don't know the components that make up their infrastructure," Andrew says.

"Although there have been a bunch of point solutions [for asset management], there's never been one really consistent way of solving the problem. A consolidated CMDB will hopefully [do this]."

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