News
Gartner: Room for Improvement in IT Asset Management
- By Scott Bekker
- 06/05/2002
Analysts at
Gartner say that most IT managers aren't keeping their houses in order when it comes to asset management.
The market research firm came out on Tuesday with an estimate that less than 25 percent of all enterprises around the world have a life cycle asset management program that can determine potential risk.
Moreover, Gartner points to its own research showing 40 percent of client hardware assets aren't tracked using tools and only 10 percent of hardware assets get reconciled against an internal database.
"These statistics show that most clients either have elaborate manual tracking procedures, or more likely don't understand their asset base," Bill Kirwin, vice president and research director for Gartner, said in a statement. "The dangers with this is that companies are getting inadequate information for planned OS upgrades, and incorrect assumptions by application development groups about what users actually have, and what they should be coding for."
Gartner alleges that inefficient or nonexistent hardware asset management processes add 7 percent to 10 percent per year to the total cost of ownership. "[This] can be $560 to $800 per user," Kirwin said.
It gets worse. According to Gartner, the costs of poor software asset management are even higher.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.