Many clients find it hard to produce an accurate list of all of their technology assets.
Many more find it impossible to provide comprehensive knowledge relating to What & Where each asset is, How it is being used, and whether it is Service Optimised, Risk Appropriate and Cost Optimised … at any given point in its life.
The chances are that you already have all of the information you need, stored somewhere where the original intended purpose required. This is Static Data, and it is a significant inhibitor to running your environment in a more optimised way … which is what you are constantly being asked to do.
Static Data is independently & manually entered by each team, meaning much of the data will be wrong, even before it gets out of date from change.
It is estimated that at least 50% of Static Data is wrong … typical asset reconciliation does not allow for this, assuming that all supplied data is accurate.
Thinking Ahead
You will ultimately benefit from an orchestrated workflow for managing your technology assets through their lifecycle, in order to reduce or eliminate Static Data, but this is not in place or complete in most cases.
Even if you are actively heading down this path, you will know that the transformation will be enormous across many different teams and departments, and will have to be implemented in phases. Thoughout these phases, the new systems will need to work collaboratively with legacy processes and masses of Static Data over an extended period of time.
In the meantime, a traditional approach would be to get a copy of all of the Static Data reports, and build a monolithic spreadsheet with lots of lookups. Not only would this take 15 minutes to open each time, but it would also do nothing to address the poor data quality of the source data, nor would it be maintainable or refreshable.
Gaining Asset Knowledge … TODAY
You don’t need to rely on a suboptimal inventory or wait to get a better understanding of which assets support certain applications, which assets are no longer in use despite you paying for related software or services, or which assets have a requirement for certain data protection controls to be in place.
We leverage our understanding of asset metadata to build a comprehensive integrated & audited repository of knowledge from key attributes of your data, collected and reconciled against many different facts and sources automatically. We’ve built the software framework to do this, because we found the traditional approach ineffective, misleading, and very cumbersome to maintain.
We can produce initial results quickly and cost effectively, and as more data sources are collected the output becomes more refined and more knowledgable about each asset.
There will always be useful information that has not been kept, but we believe that the vast majority of your data can be integrated using our service, and can be refreshed periodically to reflect underlying change.
Follow the link to Gaining Asset Knowledge for more information on our service.