Much has been going on in the background at ITAM Accelerate:
- An important milestone has been reached with the Cloud Process Kit – we have lots of process drawings, and are now getting the words down on paper!
- We’ve been working through the detail of Entity Relationship Management in the existing Process Kit. You data nerds are going to drink from the fire hose with this little feature!
- An ISO 19770-1 enterprise-level ITAM maturity assessment crafted in association with SAM Beast Consulting and Licenseware
But it’s the final bullet I want to focus on for this particular blog.
Back in 2014, I commissioned a coder by the name of Aaron Russell to create a SAM Maturity Assessment I could white-label and offer to partners about the globe. My former experiences in this area had me cutting and pasting data from Excel into Word and then saving the output as a PDF. No more! I wanted something automated, scalable, adaptable and available in multiple languages.
That platform is rapidly reaching its end of life, and so a re-platforming exercise between ITAM Accelerate and Licenseware was the cunning plan we came up with.
It got me to thinking too, about how or why we might try to seek higher levels of maturity to a business – why not just stop at ELP generation? A quick walk-through of the three levels of ISO maturity might be in order:
Trustworthy Data: We’ve all been there – staring at the output of an ITAM suite, pulling faces like a 9 year old thinking “Who put marzipan in my cake?!” (I don’t like marzipan!). Making sure we have processes that maintain our data to be as fresh as possible is going to give us a warmer feeling of assurance when we pass those compliance reports to personnel higher and wider in the organisation than just IT.
The drive for trustworthy data also relates back to our ongoing efforts to understand all the data entities and their lifecycle as they move through the kit.
Lifecycle Integration: Tricky one this! Your IT asset lifecycle is going to bump into other elements of IT that believe their processes are the be-all and end-all and have nothing to do with ITAM. For example:
On one maturity assessment I did (in a spreadsheet – gah!) for FAST, I asked an individual:
“Do you have a software request process?” The reply was a straight “yes or no”, but I will never forget the reply I got:
“Yes, on a Tuesday when Tommy is in the office.”
Such beacons of Service Management excellence have to be worked around if your request fulfilment/ software request process is to stand up to the rigours of scalability or systemisation/ automation.
Optimisation: Your process is documented, practised and aligned to business or IT strategy – but just how well is it performing? Could good be better? Could better be best? I tip my hat to Kylie here. It was her idea to take on the mantle of writing Now/ Next/ Future headings at the end of every process in the SAM process kit so that readers don’t merely copy cut and paste the process workflows into their organisation and think that the job is done.
So in returning to the impending launch of the new ITAM Accelerate Maturity Assessment, one giant leap forward taken from the former model is that we have integrated “capability” into the scoring matrix.
We’ve taken the accredited ISO19770-1 aligned ITAM Accelerate Process Kit and weaved that into the maturity assessment. So, if you tell us you perform a process, we will then dig deeper into the capabilities performed within that process from an ITAM perspective. For example, if we ask the question: do service management check the license pool for spare licenses before making a buy-no-buy decision to honour the request?
You could, from here, create an ITAM performance cube:
X: Documentation Maturity
Y: ITAM Process Capability
Z: ITAM Process Effectiveness (measured by your KPIs)
This is important to consider when we embark upon an ITAM program – how far up the maturity path do we wish to go? One global bank I consulted with got very excited about the prospect of ISO 19770-1 certification, but got cold feet upon understanding the scale of effort and funding it might reasonably take for the bank to get to the highest level of maturity. Therefore they added a policy statement calling for a cost/ benefit analysis of any proposed improvements to people, tooling and processes PRIOR to implementation of that suggested improvement – simple, but effective!
If the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, then an improvement shouldn’t go ahead.
Knowing when you’ve arrived is every bit as important as knowing the journey of how to get there, and we have absolute faith in the quality of the people and organisations behind this new ITAM maturity assessment:
- ITAM Intelligence
- SAM Beast Consulting
- SAM Charter
- Licenseware
We know by using this new and improved assessment we can help you get where you need to be.