A brief chat about culture...

I fancy myself a bit of an expert on the culture of organizations.

I led or participated in over 50 Submarine Culture Workshops as a Navy reservist.  The program was adapted from NavyAviation Culture Workshops, something aviators had been doing since the early 1990's, and also is used by the Navy's Surface community.  These events are an intense two days with six two hour sessions conducted with a 15-20 person subset of each level of the crew, going from lowest levels to the highest (deparment head) with in briefs and outbriefs with the Commanding Officer (CO) and his leadership team.

The goal is to provide the CO with actionable insights into the culture of his ship.  My experience is we had great success and submarine COs found our output often validating, sometimes eye opening, but always useful.

In Corporate America, do we truly spend time understanding the culture of our organizations? Is this something we try to cultivate? Is the modern corporation just too big to develop a meaningful culture? A submarine has a crew of maybe 150 people, but can we develop a single culture in an organization of 5,000, 10,000, 300,000 people?

Having worked in companies of these sizes, I have observed that yes, they all had particular corporate cultures.  Those developed over many years, and became part of the DNA of the company.  Of course, as company size increases, sub-cultures spring up and take root.  They tend to contain elements of the core culture, but develop their own tentacles and peculiarities.  Mergers and acquisitions create changes and conflict and sometimes they mesh, and sometimes they don't.  Culture clashes can be the biggest impediment to a successful merger.  Corporate re-organizations often don't seem to take enough stock of the clash of cultures from the changes.  And people wonder why they fail.

Is your management aware of the culture of your organization? What do they do to cultivate a particular culture? Is this something that is even on their radar?

Since my audience is Asset Managers, and IT beyond that - does your management understand the culture of your organization or department? Is it something they think about when hiring people, when analyzing problems? When reviewing projects?

Your culture can be a make or break proposition. 

I have observed that the highest performing submarines generally had cultures that we would describe as positive and people-centered. Leadership teams who take an active interest in their people and who truly listen and communicate back to their crews, simply succeed.  It is possible for hard driving leaders to achieve results, but often it comes at the expense of a culture that borders on toxic, and that may be held together simply by the will of a layer of management lower who shields others from that toxicity.  These examples don't stand the test of time.  Burnout occurs or accidents happen.  People move on to other careers (in these cases, they leave the service). It's a dangerous strategy to pursue.

What's this have to do with IT Asset Management?

I've railed that tools are not the be-all, end-all for asset management.  I consider leadership commitment to be another essential element for ITAM success.  At the highest level of your organization.  You require a culture that respects and understands the benefits that professional ITAM brings.  You require leadership's trust in you, and you need to trust them.

The good news is that culture can change.  But culture changes require an understanding of where you are now, and the leadership commitment to change and move to a better place. 

Do you understand and can you describe the culture of your organization? 
Can your management? 
Is your culture the kind where ITAM thrives, or is it one where ITAM is either barely acknowledged, or pigeonholed or forgotten entirely?
Does your company have a Chief Culture Officer? Is this person effective?

Best to be honest about addressing this.  If you're in a situation where your culture is holding your team back, you need to have a discussion with your management and get it fixed (or, God forbid, move on).  Odds are it is not just the ITAM team being impacted.  One of the things I most heard when conducting workshops was "It was nice learning that other shipmates felt the same way I did." 

When we're all working in our own little corners of the organization, we don't talk enough to each other to understand that we may have serious issues of communications, trust, etc that impact us all.  Culture workshops bring people together to expose these issues, and I recommend it.  But, you can achieve the same by talking to people.

If you're fortunate enough to be in an organization with a culture that breeds success, good for you.  Remember what that looks like, and how it happens, because if you find yourself elsewhere, your experience may be required to change the next place.

Asset vs. Configuration Management

I stumbled across this 2013 presentation published at BrightTalk.com by Pink Elephant's George Spalding on the differences and relationships between configuration management and asset management.

When we migrated to Universal Discovery for asset discovery, we made sure we took the Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) course first, which introduced us stupid asset managers to configuration items.  And while to those of us who managed assets, this seemed an infuriating way to learn, it was invaluable to have that background, especially today, when asset and configuration management databases are likely to be shared (and in the spirit of keeping data in ONE place, should be).

I really can't improve on this presentation.  It was a timely reminder of lessons learned some time ago, and I didn't have to sit through that 5 day UCMDB course again!

If you're interested in the subject, this is a great primer.

Don't Keep Your Successes Secret

I called this blog "ITAM Secrets" not because there are actually any secrets to success in IT Asset Management (there are not), but because we, as a community, seem to keep ourselves and what we do, secret.

This week, I met a gentleman in Telecom Expense Management.  This is a function much like what we do in Asset Management, focused on cost reduction.  We talked a long time about the industry and asset management since we're both in a field where the savings are obvious, but...

We know that management often doesn't really appreciate the function of asset management, or they take it for granted, or they assume that all their Service/Product managers are taking care of things.  The same thing seems true on the Telecom side.  I know from experience, before my architecture team started going through telecom bills line by line, we were just paying them, as though our telecom vendor was perfect and pure as the driven snow. They were, but we weren't smart enough to check up that things we no longer needed, were broken down and billing stopped.

I am guilty of failing to evangelize enough internally about what asset managers do, and the value we bring to the business.  Here's a secret I'll share -

DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE IN YOUR PROGRAM!

As part of the Communication and Education KPA (remember your IATAM training), we need to  understand "The success of an ITAM program strongly depends on how well the organization’s employees are educated and how well the program’s goals are communicated." [emphasis mine]

What I failed to understand adequately was that the program's goals need to be communicated, and communicated, and communicated again.  You can't overemphasize the value you're bringing to the business.  For example, here's stuff our team did, sometimes in partnership with others, but I can honestly say, that in our case, if Asset Management had not driven these things, I am confident they would not have happened:

• Saved over $1.5M annually by proactively managing maintenance renewals and cloud contracts
• Saved over $2M annually by managing end of lease terms on hardware, and extending the life of hardware, for example...
• Extended over 2000 desktop PCs by spending $100 on SSD upgrades, vice spending $800/machine on replacements.  Furthermore, benchmark testing showed the machines were just as fast under Windows 10, as the new would have been.
• Sought alternatives to purchasing Apple iPads from traditional resellers or Apple, saving over $200/machine
• Reharvested software licenses, saving half a million dollars in new software costs
• Proactively managed user accounts for web based services (of course, initially purchased outside IT) and reduced the number of needed licenses to save hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Provided our employees with the opportunity to purchase end-of-business-life PC's, laptops, and tablets via partnership with our ITAD vendor.
• Partnered with that vendor and employees to donate hundreds of machines, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment to charities.
• Responded to audit inquiries and participated in vendor audits.  While we weren't a big target of software vendors for audits, I can proudly say, during my tenure as an IT Asset Manager, we never paid ONE CENT to a vendor as a result of an audit finding.

That, to me, is an impressive list, and it's just off the top of my head.  If you were given the opportunity to think about it and research it, you could likely come up with a plethora of impressive things you're accomplishing in asset management.  If your program is just getting started, you have so much low hanging fruit, you could likely save huge percentages for the IT budget.

As your program matures, the numbers will get less impressive, but as you expand your reach and your influence, you'll be able to impact projects when they begin.  Partnering with standards setting teams and architects to ensure the best technical solutions are matched with the best asset management solutions to ensure year over year costs are minimized.

Just don't keep this stuff a secret.  You have a compelling story to tell, so make Communication and Education an important part of that story.  Those of you within IT organizations, you are going to be one of the rare groups who does not cost the organization money.  You save it.  You will have tangible results.  Where development teams struggle to show what they have done has impacted bottom line numbers, you can point to actual, real, quantifiable savings, and say, "But for us, that doesn't happen."

I'm curious, those of you who do this well, please share with our community what you're doing, and how ITAM stays in the forefront of not just your CIO, but the business as a whole.

Process. Process. Process. ITAM is all about it.

Because this blog is borne of my job search, I believe we, as professional IT Asset Managers, need to focus some attention on process versus tools.

Some words about tools...

These days, you see a lot of Flexera and Snow.  As the market leaders, that's to be expected.  Personally, I come from an HP shop, and only in my last 6 months was exposed to Flexera.  So, I've seen that tool, used it a bit as an end user, but can't really pass personal judgement on it, except my first impression was - did HP engineers leave and design the kind of interface and reporting Asset Manager should have had from the beginning of the web client?

As a job seeker, I find the focus on tools a bit infuriating.  Unless you're looking for someone to administer the tools, or to shepherd you through an upgrade or migration, the particular tool in use is not something I'd consider terribly important to someone's capabilities as an Asset Manager (AM).  As a differentiator in two otherwise identical candidates, sure, but if your HR screen is eliminating people because their background is with Asset Manager, or Aspera, and you use Flexera, you are probably eliminating candidates who should be given due consideration - to your detriment.

The tools have become more user and report friendly, and provide great value to organizations, as they don't need huge support staffs, nor detailed knowledge of the data to get good information from them. 

I consider this is a double-edged sword, because when an audit hits, you are going to crave AM's who deeply understand your data - their ability to talk the language of software asset management, and their intimate knowledge of a particular vendor's licensing, as well as understanding of your own effective license position, will make any audit go much smoother.  You should always thrive to know more about your ELP than any vendor possibly could, and be able to defend it.  If you're relying on a tool in time of crisis for this, you've already lost.

Also, in order to reharvest software and to negotiate at renewal time, it will be highly beneficial if your Software Asset Manager (SAM) understands the user community, the potential user communities, and the vendor options available. Just knowing what's installed and what's owned is table stakes.

Most modern tools provide the capability to discover assets (or use your existing configuration management systems, like SCCM, to do it), to rationalize them, and to normalize the software to the version and edition (they better!), and most provide you with utilization information.  These things are vital to the asset manager to help with decision making.  Again, these are table stakes.  If your tool can't do these, it's not an effective tool.  If you don't know whether it can, you need different asset managers.

Tools that further integrate with service management systems will provide greater value and ease the life of the asset manager and the technicians on whom we rely.  My advice when choosing tools is DO NOT FORGET THIS! Having tight integration between service and asset management tools will pay great dividends as you move forward. 

Some words about process...

First and foremost, though, you have to understand process and you have to embrace that ITAM is mostly about process.  When you go through CSAM, CHAMP, or CITAM training with the International Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM), you don't train on tools.  You train on process.  ISO 19770-1 doesn't discuss tools, it discusses processes.

Without robust processes, understood by your asset (and service) management staff, you will fail, no matter how awesome the tool is.  If I had a nickel for every time I heard some IT Manager say, "We have asset management, we bought x-awesome tool to do that," I'd have, literally a nickel, because I've only heard that once, but, I imagine there are many more people who I haven't talked to about it, and shockingly, I'd expect some who hold the title CIO, who think that way.

You can have whatever tool you paid $2M for and $250k/year in maintenance, but if your ITAM staff is comprised of people whose main function is not asset management, you have shelf-ware that probably hurts your business by providing a false sense of security that you're "doing" asset management.

People make the processes work. 

The right people, trained in the processes of asset management, working in concert with the correct stakeholders (among them - service managers, product managers, procurement and finance staff, legal staff) mean a heck of a lot more to the success of your ITAM program than any tool ever will.

When you, managers and HR folks out there, are looking for ITAM staff, drop your focus on specific tools (with the exception I noted for the people who have to administer and configure them) and focus on the individuals and how well they understand processes, and how well they understand that no tool is a savior, how well do they understand that vendors consistently change their licensing models to maximize profits for the vendor, not to make things easier for you. Here's one thing to remember, if there are multiple interpretations to a license agreement, the vendor is going to choose the interpretation that makes them the most money.  If you believe anything else, you also believe in (spoiler alert!) Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny.

Do the people you're considering joining your ITAM team know asset management, or do they know how to pull reports from the tool they were trained on? 

For asset managers, are you focused on tools, or processes?  Are you always learning? Are you curious about changes in the industry?  If not, you should be.

I contend that IT Asset Management is not rocket science.  It's hard work.  It's about relationships and staying on top of what is going on in your business.  Sometimes, it means inserting yourself in places people don't expect to find Asset Managers.  But you need to do this.  Asset Management can bring unbelievable value to your business, and it will bring even more when your ITAM staff is fully engaged, treated as am integral part of your organization, and respected for the work they do.

Now go get on it.

How's the Job Search Going, Chapter 1

I'll periodically post on my search for a new career in the Asset Management field.  Hopefully, this hiatus from working will be short-lived, so you won't suffer too many of these posts.

In a nutshell, since being informed in November that our Asset Management team was being disbanded, I have had the good fortune to get two interviews with companies looking for software asset managers and close to my home.  On the quality of life meter, these would both have been great.  In the Atlanta area, a 5 minute commute is an amazing feat.

Alas, while the interviews went well (from my perspective), I lost out on both of these.

It's still early in this search, so I must chalk these up as experience, and actually, one of these companies is so early in their journey to SAM nirvana, that I would gladly consider another role with them as I hope they expand their SAM practice.

My number one resource has really been LinkedIn. Asset Management is a niche function within the IT world, so our community is relatively small.  For that reason, there aren't millions of local resources, or companies looking for IT Asset Managers.  Globally, however, that expands dramatically, and LinkedIn has been a great source to find like-minded people.

Another useful source for me has been my membership in the International Association of IT Asset Manager (IAITAM).   If you're an IT Asset Manager, you really should join.  It's inexpensive and the training and material they provide is indispensable.  Since ITAM was largely ignored in the ITIL standards, IAITAM has filled in those gaps over the years.  They are the go-to organization for ITAM and hold a twice annual conference, the IAITAM ACE conference, which you should attend routinely if you're an asset manager.

On another front, another friend recommended taking advantage of Vetlanta, an organization focused on getting Atlanta area vets more involved in community service opportunities, and in serving the Atlanta veteran community, the goal being to make Atlanta the premier national destination for veterans.

The process has provided some lessons that I know will make me a much better asset manager going forward.  I have learned of resources and people that I didn't know existed.  People have been awesome in allowing me into their networks, and I'd like to particularly thank many of them.  Hopefully, the expanded network finds a great opportunity for me, and my team mates who were also laid off.

I'll keep posting...next time, some of my frustrations with the process.

ISAM gives a short explanation of the origins of SAM

A good blog post from ISAM on the early history of SAM.  Posted for posterity.