Cleaning up your desktop assets.

It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your desktop-computing costs are? If not, read how you can create an aggressive asset-management program to keep tabs on your costs and crank up productivity.

Recently, management at a large brokerage firm decided to take a closer look at the cost of its help-desk function. The senior managers looked around the corporate office and saw six or seven help-desk people and a budget of approximately $500,000. No problem, they thought.

But management failed to recognize that when the company changed from a centralized-computing to a distributed-computing environment, it had also distributed the need for a help-desk function. An analysis revealed the company's total help-desk staffing was 60 to 70 people, not the six or seven management counted, and that total help-desk expenditures were close to $20 million, not $500,000. In the end, management outsourced the help desk for $6 million, saving the company roughly $14 million a year.

Distributed computing and its operational and financial impact on companies have created many challenges that have rendered traditional methods for tracking and managing information-technology assets obsolete. That's why distributed-asset management should be as hot a topic for financial executives as it is for IT professionals.

In many organizations, operational and financial responsibility for desktop computing has shifted from centralized IT departments to end-user departments. When most IT assets were managed from a single data center, it was relatively simple to track and manage assets across the entire organization. But methods for tracking and managing distributed assets have lagged behind the growth in distributed computing.

Recent industry reports indicate that in the last 10 years, users spent more than $400 billion on desktop hardware and software and more than $1.6 trillion supporting this distributed-computing environment. But as decentralized computing assets have increased, so, too, have the expenses of supporting and tracking hardware and software assets. And the costs of improperly using software, such as stiff penalties for having an insufficient number of software licenses for the number of users, also have increased. These factors have negatively affected the budgets of both IT and end-user departments.

As all financial executives know, the value of a company's asset base continually changes as the market changes. The ability to trade, shift or dispose of assets at the optimal time is a must, and access to data with which both financial and information executives can make better technology decisions is critical. But while most companies spend more on distributed computing than on data-center assets -- sometimes double or triple the amount -- management strategy to reduce costs and increase productivity and utilization, long a cornerstone in the data center, is virtually nonexistent for desktop assets in most organizations.

IT ALL ADDS UP

The answer is learning how to assess and manage your desktop assets properly. Asset management enables you to track and analyze the complete life-cycle costs of technology assets, from their initial acquisition through disposal, weighing the financial implications with issues like usage and productivity, software, support, maintenance and risk of interruption to critical functions. By bringing desktop assets under control, you can increase your functional efficiency through integration with asset data. For example, if you manage your computing assets centrally and you have a problem with one personal computer in a local-area network, then information-services managers can often run LAN diagnostics, pull up the problem on their computer screen and fix it promptly. Other benefits include security and protection of microcomputer assets and more readily available asset information for management.

Knowing the value of your company's desktop asset base enables you to control capital expenditures and support costs; develop accurate budgets for migrating from centralized to client/server or distributed environments; establish a basis for determining the return on computing investments and evaluate lease vs. purchase options for distributed assets. And this information permits information-technology executives to construct and manage a rolling technology budget and establish a baseline for the optimal mix of technologies and platforms. It also allows them to estimate the capital expenditures required to roll out new applications; develop standard acquisition guidelines; and understand the enterprise-wide impact of nonstandard acquisition decisions.

To implement the correct asset-management solution for your company, you need to conduct a thorough review of your current systems and procedures, including a gap analysis between what your company is doing today and what it wants to do in the future. The following four-step methodology can help you reach your asset-management planning goals.

* Assess your requirements. Begin by asking, "Does management know all the computing assets the company has?" If the answer is no, then you need to do an asset inventory.

Before you can effectively manage computing assets, you must know what all your assets are. While this may seem obvious, many companies make multimillion-dollar asset judgments with only a best guess of what they already have. To conduct a good asset inventory, identify all your existing hardware (central-processing units, monitors, printers and so on). Collect all the information you can, including all board types and capabilities, internal configurations, types and capabilities of peripherals and model and serial numbers.

The same is true for installed software. Make sure you know the brands and types (spreadsheet, word processing and so forth), as well as which versions you have, and get your software proofs of purchase together to validate software inventory and to ensure proper licensing. Don't forget about security concerns. In many companies, virus protection varies from one local-area network, and from one desktop, to another. The inventory will reveal any weaknesses in your virus-protection program.

Analyze your data as promptly as you can so the information won't be obsolete before you finish the inventory. To do that, manage the information-collection process so you're gathering data across the company at one time, and use software tools that will collect the software and hardware configurations residing on each LAN and desktop. Check these configurations manually to confirm the information.

After you get your inventory results, address any problems that crop up, such as software-license infringements or lapses in virus protection, as quickly as you can. Once you finish implementing any changes, you should incorporate procedures to keep your data up-to-date. This includes warranty tracking (which pieces of equipment are under warranty and for what period), maintenance schedules (such as which assets are on fixed schedules and what the schedules are) and moving, adding or deleting information (which people have moved where, if and how computing assets have moved with them and how the company tracks this movement).

* Perform a cost-benefit analysis. The best way to do this is with a baseline cost-of-computing study. This will establish a baseline cost of the current environment so you can compare your company to others in the same industry and evaluate your strategies from a financial perspective.

By establishing an organized system for updating your data, you'll save money and increase productivity. Knowing precisely what hardware your company manages allows you to better project your maintenance costs and more accurately negotiate with vendors. Also, understanding how employees use software will help you decide whether software should reside on the LAN and be shared by multiple users, or whether it should reside on individual desktops. Plus, you can reallocate hardware and software to efficiently use existing resources. If one department is growing and another is shrinking, you can redistribute software licenses accordingly.

GO WITH THE FLOW

* Examine your work flow to identify potential areas for improving efficiency, productivity and resources. Start by examining the procedures used to order, track and manage equipment. For example, do the people who use their computers the most have the most powerful hardware and software? Can people who use their computers infrequently work with less-powerful equipment? In one organization, the CEO had a powerful desktop computer -- which he used about 10 minutes a day. His secretary, who used her computer eight hours a day, had a model that was several years old and significantly slower than the CEO's.

* Develop a functional and technical design in conjunction with the information-technology staff. Design and specify the required system components and modifications, including reports and interfaces with other supporting applications. Creating an implementation process ensures you're using your computing assets optimally. This means users work with the hardware and software best suited for their needs, and the company gets the right equipment and service for the best price.

Those aren't the only benefits. When acquiring hardware and software, management often forgets the costs of networking equipment like modems. An implementation process lets you know all your equipment needs. And improving your software-license compliance procedures reduces the likelihood of legal action from external organizations and the accompanying fines and negative publicity.

After you gain control of your costs, you'll be able to reduce business risks by identifying and quantifying your exposure. It's crucial to know the costs of being disabled in the IT realm. For example, if a building loses electricity for a day and 60 customer-service representatives are out of work, what does this cost the enterprise ? Does the cost justify establishing an aggressive disaster-recovery plan?

Managing your desktop assets properly will also generate productivity increases. You can facilitate software application and version standardization within work groups, which permits group members to easily exchange work files, reduces technical-support requirements and encourages standardization training. For example, if an application can be LAN-resident, users are typically more productive than if each user has his or her own software.

As you can see, the disciplines you've used in the data center are just as necessary in the distributed environment to accurately identify and streamline costs. Improvements are usually most notable in such administrative areas as equipment purchasing, vendor negotiations, warranty and maintenance tracking, cost accounting, lease management, fixed-asset accounting and billing. But to be effective, complete asset management also must include procurement, acquisition and use and disposal of both hardware and software.

Today the pendulum that swung away from the centralized data center and toward distributing computing is swinging back the other way. Managers are learning to adopt the best practices from both environments. For many organizations, introducing centralized approaches to asset management will yield a return far higher than the time and costs of the initial inventory and planning efforts.

JUST AROUND THE BEND

What's ahead for asset-management technology? In the future, it will focus mainly on systems management, help-desk technology and network-management integration. Systems management is an emerging asset-management technology that provides enhanced automation, allowing companies to manage all the functions necessary to properly control computing assets.

The final goal is to make the end-user more productive with remote tools and techniques that improve support by reducing what the end-user needs to know. As a result, end-users will be able to spend more time doing the productive tasks they're hired to do, instead of servicing the desktop.

Help-desk technology also will offer better support to end-users, especially given the many new refinements possible to network-management tools. In addition, access to an asset database that contains configuration information and a problem history can make the help-desk staff more effective.

Network-management integration focuses on managing data and distributing software from a central point. Companies face major challenges in the areas of data integrity, backup, recovery and software compliance, and vendors are responding with new software products. However, simply installing new software won't solve the problem. Management must have the discipline to have a desktop-management process in place.

Mr. Evans is president of Comdisco Professional Services in Chicago.