* Asset performance management revisited
Three years ago I wrote a column on asset performance management, anticipating that service management and asset management would need to come together in a new discipline with a distinctive set of interdependencies. Today let’s check on how this discipline is evolving.
One might liken traditional asset management to describing an Olympic athlete in terms of height, weight and clothing size. Asset performance management would address the same athlete in terms of the speed with which he or she can run the 100-yard dash, for instance, what events he or she participates in, and how he or she interacts with the rest of the team.
In IT, assets “perform” based in large part on how they’re configured. Changing service demands often require configuration changes. Similarly, understanding an “asset” beyond amortization means looking at how it’s utilized, and its track record in terms of mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR). I have even seen some IT shops keep records of utilization, MTBF and MTTR by brand and model to make more informed purchasing decisions.
Chargeback accounting is another area where asset management and service management come together. Chargeback accounting can provide dynamic insight into how and when services are consumed, as well as who’s consuming them, and the impact on the infrastructure. While few IT shops have tackled chargeback accounting in a meaningful way yet, it is clearly a wave of the future. Ultimately, what could be more empowering than to know how your services are actually used and what it’s costing you? When you map this to service quality, you have my recommended golden triangle: Quality, Cost and Demand.
There is a lot going on in the industry to support my still-high level of enthusiasm for asset performance management as a new phase in industry and IT evolution. The interest in ITIL’s configuration management database (CMDB) is one example of activity, both among vendors and IT adopters. The CMDB represents the collapsing of IT disciplines into a set of interrelated processes, rather than fragmented silos. Through the CMDB and effective auto-discovery, an IT organization willing to approach asset management in terms of asset performance management can potentially get multi-dimensional views of the same configuration item to support management in terms of lifecycle costs, asset utilization, relevance of the asset to a given set of services, ownership and responsibility for the asset, configuration history, and current states of availability/performance health of the asset, and so forth.
“Well, you might say, “that’s not really asset management anymore, is it? It sounds a lot more like management in general.” Bingo! Asset performance management can become a model for approaching virtually everything IT does, once all the interdependencies are understood. It provides the dollars-and-cents or financial-impact perspective to complement technical metrics and QoS measurements.
Is it all asset management then? I suppose not, strictly speaking. Asset performance management will require a team of professionals to work together in planning across multiple disciplines – change management, configuration management, service planning, and of course asset management itself. This team will be responsible for IT financial planning overall, or as ITIL calls it, “Financial Management for IT Services.” This team will directly inform and be informed by more real-time requirements to implement change when, for instance, poorly performing assets at end of life need to be transitioned out for new infrastructure assets as seamlessly as possible. In this new model, asset management becomes both a central point of reference, and – potentially – a coordination point for managing the day-to-day and long-term dollars-and-cents implications of everything IT does as it supports its business clients.
