The Story of 'Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business

Service Integration And Management (SIAM) is unfortunately being used to replace ITIL® by many ITIL® practitioners. Many of them are packaging ITIL® or some of its processes as SIAM. It is unfortunate that people do not want to understand what SIAM is and try to position it in a way they want to in front of their customers. 

Some see SIAM as multi vendor or multi supplier management while many see SIAM as an approach to Major Incident Management in multi vendor environment. Does SIAM really stand for these adoptions or is it something more is what has been troubles many other practitioners whom I have come across?

These are some of the common questions that has been put forth:

Q. If SIAM is about managing multiple suppliers, what is Supplier Management process of ITIL® meant for?

Q, If SIAM is about managing major incidents in multi vendor or multi supplier environment then what is the purpose of Major Incident Management sub process within Incident Management process of ITIL®?

Q. If SIAM is about managing service levels in multi vendor or multi supplier environment then what is the purpose of Service Level Management process of ITIL®?

...the questions like these goes on...

These very questions had trouble me and Rakesh Kumar  approximately 3 years back. We were concerned why we need a new approach like SIAM when already these fundamental aspects are addressed  by ITIL®. More specific to addressing integration of multiple suppliers concepts like MSI (Multi Supplier Integration) and SMI (Service Management Integration) was already available.

• Business services

• Consolidation of business and IT services

• Integration of services to deliver THE business service

• Enable plug-n-play type of scenario for supplier services

• Enable consolidation/deconsolidation of services (Business as well as IT) along with the underlying supporting components during mergers & acquisitions or demergers & spin-offs

• Manage assets in the digital age addressing the need of multiple sourcing options that organizations has

• Manage knowledge spread across suppliers and ensuring that the same is retained with the business

• Enable effective evaluation of value that SIAM brings

So SIAM has to be something different. We tried to understand the reasons that triggered the need of SIAM starting with the observations from various research papers, OGC 's committee's report or initial concept outline on Service Integration and Management (SIAM) and the likes.

All of these led to creation of multiple models, discussions, brainstorming, chucking out one model after another and eventually post multiple iterations we finalized the Fluid-Pump Model. Now, was the time to test the model. Unfortunately a model for concept like SIAM will take years for successful testing in its entirety. This troubled us. How do we do it? We decided to split it into smaller modules and test the pieces across different engagements or customers. These led to further iterations and eventually the model took its final shape that it currently is in. 

We saw SIAM as a future approach or framework for Service Management and not simply IT Service Management. Some call this as Enterprise Service Management or Business Service Management. We call it Service Management in its purest sense. This is precisely what the businesses want and have started asking from its service providers.

SIAM has to enable:

... and many more.

This is what differentiates SIAM from other things that people confuse SIAM with.

Our book Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration and Management addresses precisely the above points and that too not in theory. It provides a step by step guidance that can be used to adopt the model to an organizations specific needs. It provides the guidance for creating the organization for SIAM and then provides the steps that be used to adopt or tweak the governance structure as per the needs of the organization. We understand that SIAM cannot have one model fit all. Thus, the book addresses the need to design your SIAM organization based on the Fluid-Pump model (a mechanical analogy) that fits really well for SIAM. It provides templates that can readily used. We have done it all to make it practical and readily usable. 

It also provides the outline of processes that would enable SIAM besides the ones that can extrapolated or adopted from ITIL® along with the information systems that would enable SIAM. 

Book, next in the series will provide the SIAM process framework.

Snapshot of "Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business"

Today IT services are being provisioned through infrastructure that is located within the organizations premises or 3^rd party premises. Many IT organizations are also adopting various cloud based delivery models as well. Businesses utilize the IT services for delivering the business services, as business enabler, for business communications, etc. Thus, their reliance on IT and newer technologies is increasing every day.

With the advent of outsourcing the IT service delivery is itself dependent on service providers. A study suggests that on average every organization has outsourced to at least 3-5 IT service providers irrespective of the business domain. With multi-sourcing organizations tend to become a hotpot of the various practices from vendors. While at micro level the management lies with the vendors and they can do it well, the overall consolidation of services remains a challenge for the businesses. The Business services that are formed by the combination of smaller underlying services lack uniformity from design, to transitions to operations. This results in service packages that are either incompatible with each other or require a big integration effort. The biggest impact of this is clearly visible in slower time to market and increase in number of changes to the services .Vendors tend to solve this by associating themselves at higher levels, provide larger set of managed services. Here they call themselves as partners for the business, and try to drive services as seamlessly as possible, but in turn they charge heavily for this. Meanwhile there is no control of businesses on the individual (micro) services. All of this has made management & delivery of business services complex and challenging than ever before. Cost benefit passed on by these hybrid environments goes down the drain due to challenges in managing them. Thus, dilemma for the business is ‘How to get the control, uniformity and costs at an optimum level?’ SIAM is an answer to the Dilemma.

Moreover we come across situations where incumbent service providers are more often replaced by new service providers. The main driver of such changes is the difficulty of businesses to manage the operations. Where one service provider provides lower cost of operations, the other may provide technical acumen of highest level. Unfortunately, getting a balanced package is rare. The businesses try to cope with these shortcomings by adding the funds to projects over a period of time. And as the threshold is breached, businesses look for new suppliers to meet their needs. The change may be good in some aspects, but the cost associated with the transition and stabilization of services is painful and considerably high.

Since delivery of Services are fragmented in a multi-vendor environment with different service components being sourced from separate vendors, there are grey areas in context of ownership of overall service delivery. It is unfortunate that structure of multi-vendor or multi-sourced environment makes management of vendors besides governance of process and activities a very complicated task. Multi-sourced environments rely heavily on the core management competency of the business to deliver seamless services. Also, every organization has certain tools & processes which are unique to them and so is true for the vendor organizations. Thus, complexity of integration of multiple tools, processes and people besides the overall governance in a multi-vendor environment present a perplexing view of services that easily gives up on efficiency and effectiveness.

SIAM aims at strengthening this core and provides the directions to the suppliers and vendors to deliver defined outcomes. This drives effectiveness and efficiency of the services as expected by the business, but not as projected by the supplier.

Due to the grey area imposed by multi-vendor environment, we often find organizations to be in a situation where one vendor tries to pass on the accountability to another vendor for concerns related to delivery of services that have vendor inter-dependency and shared accountability. This creates the scenarios where there is finger pointing between the vendors resulting in key performance indicators getting blurred.

The resultant of scattered governance and multiple hierarchies is that the business suffers. They face an even daunting task to ensure that business service delivery to the end customer is not affected. Thus, the challenges of multi-vendor environment make the management of end customers, transitions and vendors even more challenging.

SIAM provides a structure to how the various suppliers interact and support each other. The dependencies between the services (by different vendors) are identified and SLA’s are designed to support the overarching services. The vendors get plugged into a structure (SIAM) that pushes suppliers to bring the best forward while appreciating the goods from other suppliers. The disputes are handled through a credit system (based on the dependencies), which leads to penalties and rewards.

Another challenge that organizations face is service and vendor consolidation during mergers & acquisitions or deconsolidation during demergers and spin-offs.

Thus, questions that every CxO possibly have are:

• How can all the above challenges be simplified?

• How can the impact of vendor change on their organization be minimized?

• How can the effect and impact of mergers & acquisitions or spin-offs on service and vendor consolidation neutralised?

The answer is a highly flexible integration model which ensures that service management becomes a strategic asset for the organization. A scalable SIAM keeps its options open to accept or reject vendors based on their performance, while giving adequate level of feedback to improve. It brings an ease of plugging or de- plugging a vendor whenever the need be without impacting the business service delivery. Besides it also simplifies the process of service consolidation and deconsolidation at the business or strategic layer. This model is in line with the Service Management And Integration (SIAM).

My book "Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business" provides explanation about the concepts of SIAM using a mechanical fluid-pump analogy. It provides a model which would effectively and successfully make SIAM work for your business, providing a clear step-by-step solution for adopting and implementing SIAM. It highlights the prerequisites and outputs that would enable organizations to use SIAM in achieving desired outcomes.

The Service-Mâché

By:
Rakesh Kumar 
Sumit K. Jha

A Papier-mâché is an amazing material. It can create amazing shapes that can surprise as well as astound you. After all, it’s just the pieces of paper bound with adhesives like glue and starch to produce strong material that can take any shape. While paper is the key ingredient, the art of creating a Mâché lies in preparing the binding material (can be a mixture of water and flour or other starch, mixed to the consistency of heavy cream or complex chemical glues) and smearing it along.

Future of products and services lies in our ability to integrate the capabilities. With more and more innovations connecting to each other, the venue for bigger innovations opens up. The idea of integration is not new, but this has always been understood in piece meals. Understanding it in the full, at all levels and developing frameworks for managing it is a prerequisite to fulfill the needs of next generation products and services.

It’s been already predicted by a few in the industry that the next path breaking products and services would come from small players. This just highlights the predicament that can be caused due to number of products that try to make sense for a business. While some of them can aim at specific customer needs, remaining and most of them would have to focus on how to integrate and collaborate. Like brokers!!

Variety of products and services with multiple suppliers pose challenges that do not meet the eye easily. While utility of services and products is enhanced by integration; the warranty, which includes availability, need to be maintained as per the business requirements.

A Gartner research estimated the hourly cost of downtime as USD 42,000 in 2005. Another study by Gartner in 2011 pegged the cost of IT downtime at USD 26.5 billion in lost revenue each year.  Neverfail’s Outages Report 2013 suggests that average cost of data center downtime across industries is approximately USD 5,600 per minute. This does not attribute the loss to brand value or reputation.

Unplanned downtime, an evil that is cursed by every business, feeds on underlying shortcomings of an IT organization to manage itself. These include:

• Reactive IT support and services
• Disintegrated processes
• Bad knowledge management across the organization
• Improper mapping of business needs and IT capability
• Lack of agility in IT to match business changes like mergers/demergers/acquisitions /spin-offs

All these get exaggerated in a multi-supplier (internal or external) environment and hence the need of integration ameliorates.

While there is a fair understanding of the need of integration in the market today, there is blatant confusion on the framework to be adopted. The frameworks too depict a conservative picture of their   applicability. Service providers have practically used their own capabilities as fences to the scope of integration frameworks, and this has resulted in restricted and rather insufficient research on the subject matter. That’s more so is a reason why we see so many frameworks, each, ironically, requiring a need of further integration.

The concept of integration has taken all these forms with one form differing from other in many aspects. The common concepts used are SIAM (Service Integration and Management), MSI (Multi-Supplier Integration) and SMI (Supplier Management Integration). Surprisingly, many use them interchangeably. Below is simple deciphering of a few:

1. Legacy SI: Typically such suppliers are traditionally responsible for some of the process of Service Operation and Service Transition. They drive CSI for the activities (or technical towers) they own. If organizational processes for these lifecycle phases are available, they would follow these processes else they would use their proprietary set of processes. In many cases it has been experienced that either the documented processes does not exist or it is not followed. We can say that in Legacy SI the degree of process maturity is low.

1. SMI: SMI are responsible for all processes of Service Operation and Service Transition besides most of the processes of Service Design. A matured SMI drives CSI for the processes that are in the scope of SMI across the suppliers. It is process driven as the basic building block is a centralized service management layer. It has a high degree of process adherence and process maturity.

1. SIAM: SIAM is responsible for the entire lifecycle of ITSM. It drives continual evolution across the lifecycle phases and the suppliers through CSI.

However, the standard approach or framework has still eluded the industry.

The future of services is demanding. While resting on the shoulders of multiple suppliers, these call for -  better customer focus, alignment of business strategies, policies & objectives, return on value (ROV), proactive operations, technically advanced tools & platforms, governance across all layers and heavy automation; a comprehensive framework is needed that can address all and has space for improvements.

Not just to achieve seamless integration, this framework must be practical and aim to enable organizations with:

• Ideation and conception of new products and services

• Innovations

• Faster response to market dynamics

• Smoother production and delivery of products  and services

• Satisfied workforce
• Cumulative knowledge for decision making
• Continual improvements

Meanwhile, should provide means to realise investment done in people, knowledge and technology.

SIAM is the concept that encapsulates all the above and when looked with broad sight, can reap benefits to businesses IT and Non-IT alike. SIAM must be implemented with a larger roadmap that looks at the strategic needs of the business while being able to deliver tactically. The suppliers must be enabled to work in tandem to yield synergy and innovation. The supplier’s addition and removal must be made efficient and so must be the creation of new products & services. A feedback mechanism should ensure that the right information flows for continual improvement of services. And the visibility of services must be ensured to business and management.

The Service-Mâché is going to be used to shape the businesses of future, with suppliers as paper strips and SIAM as the glue. How strong the glue is, depends on what it’s made up of.

The book on SIAM 'Making SIAM Work - Adopting Service Integration And Management For Your Business' from the authors tries to address the need of an approach or model for SIAM along with the above aspects of the Next Generation IT organization. It suggests a model for SIAM and the way it can be implemented in a practical manner.

An Approach To Keep Your Focus On The Customer

It is very important that one listens to what the customer says. Listening is divided into 5 stages.  I have used these five stages to devise my model or approach that would help an organization to keep their focus on the customer. This approach is represented below.

Key Reasons For Reactive IT Organization

It is a fact that today most of the IT organizations are reactive. What makes them a reactive organization?

Many organizations have a belief that “Being Proactive” is expensive and does not provide value. Also, business does not see value from IT.

These two points couples together and steers the business’s decision to not to make any additional investment in IT in order to drive the proactive behavior.  Thus, what IT gets is an inappropriate allocation of funding.

Moreover, IT themselves are not sure regarding the business benefits they can bring in by being proactive. This makes it impossible for them to convince the business to make an investment. The situation is further complicated since most of the IT organizations till date are cost centers.

When the profit margins are strained, this status of IT in the overall organization results in IT being one of the first to face the axe. IT generally is the first department that faces tactical cost cutting. This leads to a negative spiral and IT’s image is further degraded. IT attempts to ensure BAU. Their effort goes into ensuring that the downtime is minimized. They take a step farther from pro-activeness.

Cost cutting leads to delay or dropping of new initiatives and retrenching staff. Overall effect is poor or bad staffing.  Hence, the reasons for reactive organizations get compounded. Besides these following points add fuel to the fire making the IT organization even more reactive:

• Misaligned strategic, tactical and operational layers of the organization
• Poor communication across the various organizational layers, groups and teams
• Lack of appreciation, recognition and rewards to employees for proactive initiatives (This makes the employee think that why should one make an effort which is not recognized or appreciated)

Is Your Organization Reactive Or Proactive?

A number of IT organizations believe that they are proactive since they perform some of the activities proactively. So how to tell whether your organization is a reactive or a proactive organizations. Answer to the following questions will help you to judge this.

Q1. Are you often facing the state of fire fighting?

Q2. Are you constantly achieving availability over the committed levels?

Q3. Are you aware about the current IT maturity?

Q4. Do you have evolving processes?

Q5. Is IT objective aligned or integrated with business objectives?

Q6. Does IT speak in the language of TCO and RoI (or ROV) for services?

Q7. Do you focus on customer experience and expectation?

Q8. Are you able to convert outcomes into $ value and showcase the value of IT to business?

Q9. Is your IT organization constantly trying to align itself with changing business needs?

Q10. Do you provide proactive guidance to the business in terms of the new or improved business services (enabled by IT)?

Q11. Is your ratio of automated to manually logged tickets <= 1?

Now rate your answers using the following table:

Q. No.	Score  (Answer = “Yes”)	Score  (Answer = “No”)
1	0	1
2	1	0
3	1	0
4	1	0
5	1	0
6	1	0
7	1	0
8	1	0
9	0	1  (Is proactively aligned)
10	1	0
11	1	0

After rating your answers, sum your score. If your total score is less than 10, it reflects that there is a very high probability that your organization is a reactive organization. Lesser the score greater is the degree of reactiveness.

Publisher Audit: Candidate Selection Strategy

Before any software license audit is initiated, Publisher needs to identify the candidate organizations for the audit. One view that people have is that the Publishers randomly approach an organization for the audit and wherever they get a skeptical response, they proceed to the next stage of audit. While this looks to be a good approach but would likely involve efforts with lesser return besides creating a negative image about the Publisher in the minds customers.

Some of the factors that drive the candidate selection strategy for software license audit are:

• Probability of recovering the penalty or license fee in case the candidate company is a defaulter: This factor will have a positive influence on the strategy if there is a high probability of recovery while a negative influence if the probability is low. E.g. a company approaching bankruptcy will not be a candidate from whom the Publisher will be able to recover anything. Thus, such organizations will not potentially qualify as a convincing candidate for the audit. In this case the strategy is being negatively influenced.
• Geographical location of the candidate company: Geographical location of an organization determines the degree of control that a Publisher has in the location to get their legal rights executed. E.g. If the candidate organization is at a location where the Publisher can easily execute their legal rights will have a positive influence while the location where execution of legal rights is challenging or extremely time consuming will have a negative influence on the candidate selection strategy.
• Prevailing customer relationship: If the customer relationship is very strong or the customer is a significant customer then it becomes difficult for the Publisher to proceed with auditing such a customer. There might be instances where despite knowing that there is some degree of non-compliance a Publisher might overlook the same in the interest of larger business interest. Thus, a strong customer relationship has a negative influence on the candidate selection strategy.
• Inconsistency in purchasing patterns: Inconsistent purchasing pattern for an organization is something that is treated suspiciously. Higher is the degree of inconsistency, greater is the influence of this factor on the candidate selection strategy. In other words an organization with a highly inconsistent purchasing pattern becomes a strong candidate for audit.
• History of poor license compliance: Poor license compliance history makes an organization more susceptible to a license audit. Thus, an organization having a history of non-compliance will have a positive impact on candidate selection strategy.
• Size of customer: Size of the organization translated into number of potential users of the license. Thus, large size will positively impact the candidate selection strategy while the small size will have a negative impact.
• Mergers and acquisitions: Mergers & Acquisitions leads to scenarios where the potential users of licenses increase besides increasing the risk of potential non-compliance due to the non-compliance by the organization being acquired. Second factor is something which the acquiring company has to be extremely careful about. Thus, more is the number of mergers & acquisitions or larger is the company being acquired/ merged, greater will be the risk. This would also mean that candidate selection strategy will be positively influenced.
• Geographical spread: Geographical spread of the organization means the numbers of countries the organization is operating in. More is the geographical spread, greater is the challenge in managing the licenses and more susceptible the organization would be to non-compliance. Thus, high degree of geographic spread would positively impact the candidate selection strategy of the publisher.

Following table shows impact of the factors on candidate selection strategy.

Also, factors in red are the ones which can single handedly contribute to an organization not being a candidate for audit. Combination of the impact of all these factors eventually helps the Publisher in deciding the candidate for an audit. Based on the maturity additional factors may be used by the publisher.

Based on criticality of the factors, these factors can be assigned a weight. An expected value can be provided to each parameter. Accordingly a combined score can be obtained. Organizations having a score more than a pre-determined threshold will qualify as a candidate for audit. Thus, an automated tool can be used to determine the potential candidate.

Objective of Publisher Audits

My earlier blogs shed light on Software License Management and Software License Forensics. Let us try to understand the objective of the publisher during such audit in the order of priority

• Revenue Generation: Unaccounted licenses (when more than the license procured is being used or pirated software is being used) or non-compliance to license terms mean lost revenue for the Publisher. They would want to recover such lost revenue.

• Protection of IP: At times non-compliance also leads to violation of IP of the Publisher. It is of utmost interest for the publisher to protect its IP.

• Prohibiting piracy: Unaccounted licenses (when software with a crack serial code is being used) also mean piracy. Piracy leads to lost revenue for the Publisher as well. But in this objective the primary goal is to prohibit and advocate against piracy.

• Creating and agreeing a license consumption baseline for a customer: This is more of a mutual exercise where customer even is not sure about what they are consuming. The primary objective in this case is to arrive at a baseline based on which all future license consumption can be based upon.

• Encouraging and enabling customers deploy Software Asset Management (SAM): Having an effective SAM deployed is not only beneficial for the publisher but also for the customer and enables ease of calculating license utilization. It creates a win-win situation for both publisher as well as the customer.

• Helping customer improve their SAM: We have seen that organization growth and restructuring besides mergers and acquisitions put forth a major challenge for SAM. Thus, SAM has to improve and evolve. Publishers enable their customer by helping them improve their SAM. Again, this is a win-win situation for both of them

• Educating customers on license usage, terms of usage and SAM: Here the basic purpose is to educate the customer regarding SAM, the license types and their terms of usage besides the usage of license itself.

• Internal process adherence and governance: Publishers have their internal process controls and governance. They need to comply with it. At times this triggers the audit.

• Customer satisfaction (through overall contribution towards their SAM and compliance initiatives)

Software License Forensic

My earlier blog on Software License Management talked about intentional non-compliance by organizations. Organizations go to an extent whereby they uninstall the unlicensed versions when a publisher approaches them for an audit. They feel that they have met compliance issues as Publisher will not be able to detect the non-compliance.

Publishers deploy expertise and technology during the audit that does a deep dive into the systems to get the history of what has been used. For example registry entry can provide significant information regarding what software was deployed. Such deep dive is termed as Software License Forensic Analysis

Software License Forensic is an investigative approach to identify the actual license usage by an organization that is under Publisher review. Such forensic techniques and methodologies provide a complete or detailed picture of the software deployment in an organization. This provides valid and sufficient proof to the Publisher to decide the future course of action.

Software License Management

Organizations use software. The software should be licensed. With the increase in number of people working in an organization, there is increase in complexity in managing the licenses and ensuring that unauthorized copy of any software is not installed. So there could be a situation that organizations have software for which they do not have a license or for which the number of licenses is less than the instances used. This makes Software License Management a very important and critical activity of Software Asset Management.

Organizations are legally liable to the publishers if:

• They have any unlicensed version of software deployed, or
• They do not comply with any of the terms of license agreement

Software Compliance is a key activity of Software License Management. It has to ensure that an organization complies with the publishers licensing requirements.

The activity that organization performs to ensure that they are in compliance is termed as software license audit. IT departments struggle to keep track of licensing usage. This needs the specialized Software Asset Management Team to help track and manage licenses. There are tools to help asset management team identify the software that are deployed in the environment. Manual audits are also performed for a certain sample to authenticate the discovery data.

Non-compliance to the licensing terms could be unintentional or intentional. In case it is unintentional then internal software license audit gives opportunity to the organization to ensure compliance. Organizational growth and restructuring besides Mergers and acquisitions contributes to the chaos in terms of unknown license usage/consumption even if an organization has a good software asset policy.

On the other hand there are intentional non-compliance cases where organization tries to save on the license costs.

Software publishers have to manage and enforce their intellectual property rights besides ensuring that their customers are paying for what they use.  A Publisher can ask for an audit at any time. Such audits are termed as Publisher Audits. It is during this course that an organization could readily agree for an audit or might decline the request. There is a typical negotiation that happens at this stage. Publisher provides their data of what they presume is the licenses consumed by the organization. Organization may negotiate and agree at a figure and buy the licenses.  On the other hand there might be a dispute. In such a situation Publisher can take a legal action. The worst for the organization can be that it may face a closure of business due to non-compliance.

The Dead Asset Syndrome

Organizations procure assets, both software and hardware, based on certain projections or needs. Also, there are assets which are no longer utilized or rarely utilized. In case of software assets many organization continue to spend on recurring license cost besides spending on support cost for both software as well as hardware support for dead assets. From the organization’s RoI perspective these are dead investments and hence dead assets.

Another concern that organizations have is regarding the utilization rate of their assets. Organizations continue to invest on IT assets whereas they could have optimized their asset utilization, which results in a poor RoI. With passage of time these too contribute to dead assets.

An even more alarming fact is that a number of organizations are not even aware of possessing dead assets. Dead assets not only have poor RoI but poor TCO as well.

If we try to segregate the dead asset in terms of hardware and software assets, then the percentage is higher for software assets. Software assets are more of invisible assets since they are determined by the licenses which are not mostly physically visible or consume physical space.

Since hardware assets consume physical space (data center, desk space, inventory or others), they are visible assets. Thus, comparatively organizations are more proactive in disposing dead hardware assets that have reached end-of-life.

If we plot a graph of asset procurement and its utilization against time over a period it would give a pattern for dead assets. This is what I would term as Dead Asset Syndrome.

It is very important for organizations to come out of Dead Asset Syndrome by proactively eliminating dead assets and improving their asset utilization rate along with RoI for the assets. How this can be done is what I would cover in another blog sometime later.

At this stage it is important to be able to know whether your organization suffers from the dead asset syndrome. If answer to any of the following question is ‘No’ then it is very likely that your organization is a victim of dead asset syndrome:

• Do you have a list of ALL hardware and software assets procured (with details regarding date, cost, depreciation, support, etc.)?
• Do you know where ALL your hardware and software assets are being used?
• Do you know when ALL your hardware and software assets were last used?
• Have you been able to recover ALL your hardware and software assets if it was no longer in use?