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Watch Your Assets continued page 3

10/5/2005

The Ultimate ROI

The savings are clearly there, but measuring the direct ROI of an effective IT asset management program can be difficult, say campus technologists. According to the University of Minnesota’s Gregory, one way that the ROI of an asset tracking implementation can show up is as “value-added benefits.” That includes gains in areas such as classroom uptime, equipment ease-of-use, remote solutions to classroom problems, reports and trend analysis of technology use, remote shutdown and lockout of classrooms, help desk capability, and theft prevention. Of course, the ultimate measure of success is the degree of faculty and student satisfaction, Gregory points out, which has long-term strategic and financial impact.

Many schools are just starting to realize that good practices in managing and securing technology assets can provide a big payback. Increasingly complex networks and bigger and bigger IT budgets mean that there’s more to keep track of, more dollars at stake, and more time and staff spent tracking assets. Vendors, for their part, are offering progressively sophisticated solutions in response, including suites of products with various types of tracking and management modules to choose from. In short: Today, whether you’re looking at managing a relatively small amount of equipment in a single department, or an entire institution’s technology investment, products for IT asset management are out there. It’s time to assess your need, build your short list, and start saving staff hours, money, and downtime.


A Wealth of Overlapping Solutions

THE CONCEPT OF MANAGING IT assets via software is still fairly new to much of higher education, just as several years ago, it was an emerging concept for many businesses. But an ever-expanding range of asset management tools are now available to campus IT professionals. In general, solutions that can be used for IT asset management may be grouped into several classes: a) large systems for traditional fixed asset management, b) targeted solutions for managing IT assets specifically, and c) systems that do both.

From the ERP side. For managing buildings and associated elements, most schools of any size use some sort of facilities management software, often as part of a larger ERP suite. Oracle/PeopleSoft (Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, and now PeopleSoft EnterpriseOne Asset Management, as well; www.peoplesoft.com, SAP www.sap.com, and Sungard SCT (Enterprise Data Warehouse; www.sungardsct.com) all offer products in this category. While it’s possible to track IT assets using modules from these products, they’re generally designed from a financial perspective and intended for fixed asset tracking and management. They may not have the capacity and level of detail required to manage campus IT assets well.



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