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Case Study

IT Asset Management: A Global Financial Services Organization

Description of Client's Business

The client is US-based IT organization of a global credit card processing corporation.

The Client's Challenge

the Company knew that IT asset management was a key issue. The main client contact, the Director of Purchasing, identified his corporation's main source of pain as having two separate purchasing organizations with different legacy systems and no controls of purchasing processes. "The client needed to better manage their systems because they had problems linking their data together”. "Redundant data entries regarding asset location were taking place and the problems were not well defined. Tag numbers with assets were not aligned. Data was being re-entered several times. Plus, they had to repeatedly perform physical inventories and reconciliations to find their assets."

A corresponding problem was that the client had a requirement to charge out their services to their business units, so without a proper asset management system, they didn't realize how many servers were actually being used to manage a given client (50 servers vs. 20 actual servers).
Another client challenge was the lack of rigorous visibility and transparency of IT costs. It was determined that the client was not utilizing a set of metrics to gauge how well their IT organization was doing. This led to many IT decisions being made without the right information or information at all.
 

Wability Solution

Over the course of several conversations with the clients, Our IT Business Risk Management Practice team discussed IT asset management and how the client could reduce risk, manage IT costs, and improve operational efficiencies with a comprehensive IT asset management program.

We began by helping the client outline four distinct objectives

  • Gathering and documenting executive expectations around IT asset management

  • Determining reasonable roles and responsibilities for IT asset management

  • Comparing the current asset management capabilities vs. best practice capability maturity models and where to focus our efforts; and

  • Deciding where the client should focus from an IT strategy perspective

In addition to pursuing these objectives, the team was also helping the client identify ways to lower their total IT costs.
  Wability was able to identify these redundancies and areas of incomplete data and show how costs could be significantly reduced by: streamlining processes and filling data gaps.

Next, using our IT Asset Management Lifecycle Framework, the team focused on three key asset management recommendations –– with a three to six month window –– concerning the overall governance structure across the organization. The people in the client's operations group and the development departments needed to have specific roles in place and be accountable to an asset management governance group. The recommendations included:

  • Setting up automation capabilities for enhanced asset management

  • Establishing reporting capabilities; and

  • Putting a governance infrastructure in place to make sure they all worked together.
     

Benefits/Results to the Client

As a result of this work, the client now has a clear strategic focus for implementing an IT asset management initiative and can directly identify how they will lower costs, better manage risks, and improve IT operational efficiencies.

One key finding was that a critical server was discovered to have defective data. It had been housed in Europe and had not been logged into the system. By taking this server off-line, a major security risk was eliminated.

The client's asset management system consisted of a series of islands of responsibility across the disparate parts of the organization, leading to an insecure infrastructure and many areas of IT risk that were unmanaged.

By sharing our IT Asset Management Framework and experience working with other clients, we brought people together, created a shared vision of why asset management is so important, and ultimately helped this client develop a plan to meet their risk and cost management objectives."