How IT Asset Management Is Like Making Coffee

At Redemtech, we're in the business of business process outsourcing, or BPO in support of the lifecycle management activities necessary to effectively manage technology assets. Demonstrating how our service offerings improve the bottom line while insuring security and environmental responsibility is what I spend much of my time discussing with clients and prospects.

But the underlying process when applied to IT asset management can sometimes be a bit vague for people, so in explaining how it works and what its larger implications are for the enterprise, I've been known to occasionally compare it to the process of making coffee.

Let's say that you're asked to make a pot of coffee for your colleagues, a task you've never before tackled. It seems simple enough, so you fumble your way through it and get the job done. The result probably won't be great—the quality of the coffee, that is—but you've at least accomplished your mission.

But wouldn't it have been better to have had a set of defined steps to follow, a process proven to have worked in the past, one built to be as fail-safe as possible for each future iteration? Why not take advantage of a set of processes designed by experienced coffee makers who have experimented with many possible variations, trying different amounts of coffee of different blends, with slightly different quanties of water, and adjusting brewing times a little, and even experimenting with introducing just enough automation into the process to eliminate the guesswork and human error, until they finally reached the optimal combination? Of course it would.

Okay, so let's switch back to the arena in which we operate every day—helping organizations to better manage IT assets through their entire lifecycles. Too often, we see organizations intent on going for a quick fix, by simply rolling out a software tool to fix the problem rather than thinking about the larger process and its effectiveness. You'll need to think about who would be responsible for what, about how and what to measure, and how much of the process should be automated, and at what points. Otherwise, this haphazard "fix" will fail.

Finally, while it should be obvious, I'll say it anyway: organizations need to decide what outcomes they hope to achieve, and how success will be measured. In the coffee-making exercise, success or failure may be defined simply by whether your boss liked the coffee or didn't. Effective IT asset management is a tad more complicated to define, but make sure you have some desired, measurable outcomes in place before you embark on the process.

Our processes succeed in bringing that expertise to your management practices providing your organization with a jolt of energy—without the caffeine.