Why this blog?
I decided to start this blog because I love IT Asset Management.Since our Asset Management team was laid off, I have been seeking employment in the same field, and have determined from that process that I really enjoy this even more than I thought I did.
If I am not going to be returning to work immediately, I want a way to continue to focus on the field, the industry, and force myself to stay current.
That's the genesis of the blog.
Who am I?
I started in IT really in about 1995. I was working as a shift engineer, operating a communications system, for Lockheed when I decided to go to George Washington and get a Masters degree in Engineering Management. My focus area was Information Management, and at the same time, I was starting to work on projects around the nascent field of IP networking. This was the same time that the Internet was beginning to explode and the web was just coming into its own. It was an exciting time.
I left Lockheed because the Washington DC/Northern Virginia area was too cold for our family, and Lockheed, after paying for a Master's degree, wouldn't pay me commensurately. I left to return to Georgia, and Atlanta, where I had gone to Georgia Tech, working for BellSouth Advertising and Publishing Corporation. You may have known us as "The Real Yellow Pages."
While a part of a 70,000 person company, we were about a 5,000 person part of it that operated semi-autonomously. We had our own IT, our own Sales force, and pretty much ran the business outside the BellSouth umbrella. It was a great, family-style environment. I started with BAPCO as an IT Strategist, reporting directly to the CIO. Heady times.
Eventually, I moved into IT Infrastructure Architecture where I gained responsibility for all our data center and physical end user assets. I was trained as an IT Architect, so it was trial by fire. I learned a ton in those years, and continued that through our "merger" with SBC in 2007 (when we became AT&T), until 2012, when AT&T sold 53% of the Advertising & Publishing group, including yellowpages.com, to Cerberus Capital.
I had already led a couple of PC refresh projects at that point, and owned all the Data Center assets, so we were asset managers, before there really was an Asset Management avocation. We just didn't know it.
With that 2012 sale, the new company (YP, LLC, or YP.com) had most of the technical staff in Los Angeles focused on the new media products, so architecture for non-print products went to LA, and the print media products remained with our team in Michigan. Since I was the "PC" person, our new CIO, brought in (wisely) by Cerberus, asked me to take on Asset Management in toto.
We had a pretty good handle on hardware, but we really hadn't treated software as assets to manage. We had taken an architectural approach, and while some of the goals were the same, not all of them are. We had to really build a software asset management practice from scratch, and that's what we did.
I had a team of 2 people initially. Myself and my hardware expert, then we added a great staff member to assist with software and we in-sourced our Asset Management system (HP Asset Manager, with DDMi, now UD) from our support vendor and I added an HPAM/UD/Connect-It resource. So we had a team of 4, and about 10,000 end-user assets and about 5000 data center elements.
There's much more to tell, but that's where we were sometime in 2013, about a year after the Cerberus split.
The rest of the story....another post can handle that.
