Is your organization looking to optimize ITIL processes, purchase new IT assets, or automate IT activities? In order to accurately plan for the future, maintaining an up-to-date inventory of all the current assets deployed is key. Educated guesses of your organization’s asset base simply won’t cut it, and frankly, are recipes for failure.
Documenting all asset types into specific categories such as manufacturer, product family, series and model, in combination with relevant dates (date of purchase, start of operation, planned date of decommissioning), is crucial for TCO calculations and bench markings.
Additionally, IT assets have to be maintained in order to keep their value. Essentially, computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) can only realize their full potential when they work against a holistic, well-maintained asset base that synchronizes maintenance work with available downtime windows that are being handed down from the service agreement level to the asset level.
Functional Benefits of FNT Command
The asset management features of FNT Command provide a holistic overview of all the dimensions mentioned above and also allows each and every asset to be linked to individual purchase and maintenance contracts.
FNT’s Asset & Configuration Management solution is a central Configuration Management System (CMS) containing information about all of the configuration items in the IT and telecommunications infrastructure that are needed to provide high-value IT services in line with ITIL V3. This way, organizations can identify, manage, and verify their entire infrastructure, including all CI interrelationships, via a standardized, dynamically expandable data model.
With FNT Command, organizations will experience the following benefits:
Acceleration of ITIL Processes
Thanks to the interlinking of all CIs in the CMS, organizations can improve the quality and speed of planning and implementing changes within their IT environment. FNT Command’s comprehensive planning tools provide an overview of all IT assets over their entire lifecycle. Organizations can now track and document the history and development of IT assets/CIs with total accuracy.
Faster Rectification of Incidents and Increased Uptime
Using the end-to-end data model and comprehensive analysis of the dependencies of all CIs, errors can be tracked and corrected from the service down to the individual cause. With FNT Command, it is possible to evaluate the entire cause-effect chain and generate all of the key information required for troubleshooting. Overall, faster rectification will significantly increase customer satisfaction.
Visibility into IT Services
Using the integrated license management function and a variety of other information about all CIs (e.g., cost and availability), organizations can perform a detailed cost-analysis of all IT services in order to keep IT costs under control. The extensive information available in the CMS also makes it easy to fulfill legal requirements and obligations with respect to information about IT environments.
Overall, FNT Command optimizes purchase contracting and maintenance services so that organizations can accurately plan for the future. In part four of our multi-part series, we’ll discuss the importance of providing focal reference points for all ITIL processes.
