One of the main issues impeding good IT asset management is the difficulty attracting and retaining staff to perform important but often repetitive IT asset management processes. Another major hurdle is that IT asset management responsibilities are usually distributed across multiple IT and even business teams, even if an organisation has a dedicated and centralised IT Asset Manager role.
Some of the actions an organisation can take to address these people-related issues include:
- Establishing or leveraging an existing Steering Committee / Governance Board chaired by the CIO (or equivalent) and including the managers of staff who have IT asset management responsibilities across the organisation. This can be dedicated to IT asset management or leverage an existing committee/board e.g. for IT, IT Operations, Asset Management (all classes) or Enterprise Architecture.
- Allocate the responsibility for each IT asset management process against staff (and any external providers). Typical roles involved in IT asset management include: Enterprise Architect, Asset Owners/Custodians, End User Administration Team Lead, Windows Administration Team Lead, Unix/Linux Administration Team Lead, Network Administration Team Lead, Database Administration Team Lead, Cloud Platform Administration Leads, and Application Support Leads.
- Embed IT asset management KPIs into the Performance Plans of the relevant staff in your organisation
- Embed IT asset management KPIs into the contracts of relevant external suppliers (with levers to ensure these KPIs are achieved and maintained)
- If finding and retaining staff to fulfill IT asset management roles is an issue, consider hiring Victorians from diverse backgrounds. There are several programs encouraging more people from diverse backgrounds into entry-level cybersecurity and IT roles.
- Educate Risk and Audit committees on the need to consider auditing IT asset management.
Some examples of entry level IT asset management jobs include:
- Infrastructure asset identification (e.g. maintaining CMDB data, chasing up missing data)
- Infrastructure scanning (identifying missing assets and patch levels)
- Malware monitoring & remediation (on PCs)
- Maintaining client-side application packages
- Phone and PC provisioning
- Infrastructure performance monitoring against SLAs
- Monthly KPI reporting
- Yearly reconciliation (e.g. CMDB vs HR system reconciliation for end user devices)
- Certificate management
- Secure asset disposal
- Identity lifecycle management user access reviews.
Some examples of more advanced IT asset management/career progression jobs could include:
- Infrastructure patching (servers)
- Backup management and restore testing
- Windows server administration
- Unix server administration
- Network administration
- Office365, Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform administration
- Application support/administration
- Cybersecurity analysis (including Security Operations Centre eyes-on-glass)
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