foreign welcome to today's webinar proactive versus reactive with servicenow it Asset Management our presenters today are Daniel Slocum Shane Cooper and Chris Keyser before we begin I'd like to just give you a little background information about Glide pass Consulting recently named the America's Elite partner of the year and the global Elite partner of the Year Glide fast has over 3 100 servicenow certifications over 500 expert consultants and a csat score of 4.8 out of 5 and many other accolades as you can see here before we begin we'd like to launch an initial Poll for today's webinar so on your screen you should see the question would you say you are being proactive or reactive in your use of it Asset Management okay so it looks like 73 of you are being reactive so you are in the perfect place today to learn how to become more proactive when it comes to it Asset Management now I'm going to pass it off to Shane Cooper to kick off the webinar today I'm just going to go through a little bit of agenda right now so we're looking at the proactive versus reactive approach so moving from the gotchas to gotchu with this um we really want to go into what being proactive is with asset management and what being reactive really means uh based on the poll it sounds like a lot of you are already kind of aware of that as it goes forward so we're going to go through each individual area uh go into Hardware Asset Management what it means for proactive versus reactive in that software asset management and the same thing and then Enterprise asset management and then we'll have some time at the and for any questions and answers with this I kind of wanted to give a high level overview of proactive versus reactive and what it means that way we can get into detail of how we can address some of these issues so reactive obviously you're looking at uh management addressing issues as they come up maybe not really understanding what is causing the issues just addressing them uh day by day as you see them being proactive you're looking at addressing the issues before they come up trying to anticipate the problems think of something like an audit you know an audit's coming up so you want to go ahead and gather that data correctly before it gets to that point itm and servicenow is really broken down into three different areas you're looking at Hardware asset management software asset management and Enterprise Asset Management now we're going to discuss each of the ways that each of those areas can really help with that proactive versus reactive approach and we do have one more poll that we wanted to go ahead and give before we move into each area perfect are launching poll number two which product of itam are you most interested in ham Sam or Enterprise Asset Management so Shane it looks like 54 of people are interested in ham 35 and Sam and 12 in Enterprise Asset Management all righty sounds like I got my work cut out for me in the next section so we're going to be a little less formal with this one right now uh I'm gonna ask Keyser uh Chris keezer and Daniel Slocum if there's anything that they want to bring up while I'm talking please feel free this is a group effort here we are all really experts in all of asset management uh but we each have our own individual areas that we kind of specialize in so really if there's any questions on the back end as well uh please feel free to ask them I wanted to get into what Hardware asset management is first so we're looking at really the it assets part of this um so you're looking at your your servers your network equipment your end user Computing all the way into your consumable items like your tables your docking stations your speakers um so with this there's a big difference between your hard your assets and your consumables on this so with Asset Management you're wanting to look at that Financial impact to your organization uh who has the asset what what uh is its use and any contractual information that you have like any maintenance or support or end of life or extended warranty without Hardware Asset Management in place really the organizations wouldn't know what assets they own if you're looking at assets that maybe somebody leaves the company and they still have an asset that's something big that we want to bring back in or maybe there's assets that are sitting in the stock rooms that are still assigned to users that have our left so really getting a handle on everything around your Hardware asset life cycle and financials I mentioned lifecycle a little bit here so uh and I've already mentioned asset management is not configuration management uh configuration management is going to be the focus on the usage of the assets um the relationships that it has in your network the actual information of a live device uh with Asset Management uh like I said you're looking at the financial piece of this but that gets into the life cycles uh part of this so we're looking at request procurement receiving those assets as they are shipped and received to you after they're procured keeping them in stock and then at the end of the life cycle we're looking at disposal of these retirement and Disposal maybe tracking information for the certificate of Destruction that way you can verify that this asset was disposed of correctly so with that asset management is is important to actually hold the data but whenever you get into the automation of it that's whenever you really start seeing the benefits of this getting into proactive uh Hardware Asset Management here so with this like we've already talked about some of the over overview of Hardware Asset Management uh what it is there are some key areas where you can be more proactive uh versus reactive with this so the first one that we're looking at is the advanced shipment notice or uh the purchase order receiving side of this so uh whenever you order an asset you want to create that asset as early as possible in in the system that way you know the financial impact to the organization immediately so you're looking at model Creations during the PO process the asset creation during the receiving process that way you're not having to wait for Discovery or SCCM or Avanti to scan the device and know that it's in your system you already know from the moment of ordering it getting into inventory and stock orders um so stock rules are something inherent to servicenow stock rooms and the stock rules allow you to kind of maintain these stock levels you can do that for both assets and consumable items and this will ensure that you always have those resources available before somebody orders it you realize that you need to procure it foreign audits now I mentioned audits a little bit earlier audits uh really the important thing is knowing where your assets are and that way you're not having to have a risk of losing them or having security breaches uh the same thing with the asset audits as well I mentioned uh disposals so if you are accurately disposing of something and you go to audit that list of assets you should know where those are what the state of them is did you actually destroy the hard drive to get rid of the pii data that's on there uh the next line here that I want to talk about is warranty tracking so we do have quite a few different warranty Integrations that we've tied into the important piece of this is to actually track that warranty as it's related to the asset whether it's just a single date for the end of warranty if you've gotten an extended warranty we want to make sure that we're tracking that so that we know whenever we can start getting into refreshes refreshes with warranty tracking makes it a lot easier to keep up with assets that are becoming end of life if you go through and say I have 2 000 laptops that are going to be end of life in six months we need to go ahead and start working on a refresh process for it asset Reclamation so this is getting more into the later life cycle piece of this getting into the retirement of this so proactively collecting and reissuing assets I already mentioned refreshes here this is part of that process so we're taking those assets we're reclaiming them uh and then we are accurately retiring them and disposing of them so once you start getting into collecting that data you can know hey I want to know where this specific asset is and you look at that look at these states and substates and you look at the different life cycle history of it and you know exactly where it is and what's going on with it and I've already mentioned refresh orders as well so really with this one servicenow does make it easier for you to go ahead and refresh a list of assets based on models based on warranties so this makes it a lot easier to get into there's a question here that I thought you might want to answer live before we um move on and the question is about warranty tracking Fields out of the are they out of the box or are they custom yeah there is one uh date field for warranties uh that you can have out of the box um that is something that's already stored on the asset record uh and then there's also the relationship uh of contracts to assets uh so one of the recommendations is usually to create your contract records to track those warranties and then associate the contract with the specific assets that are covered so contracts can actually have a one-to-many relationship so you can have one contract that would cover many different assets if you have an extended warranty on them or just a regular warranty on them and you can associate that with the specific assets that are covered Daniel if you wanted to add anything else I think you were great thank you all right um really the last piece for me here I wanted to show a little bit of the asset workspace that is in uh ham Pro with this one I mentioned we're looking at uh like the expirations of warranties we're looking at uh any of the leasing contracts or any of the warranty contracts uh any of the requests that are coming through or whether it's a purchase request or a refresh request and that information is really shown very clearly in the asset workspaces it's it's very useful to have that visibility here into the system because you want to make sure that you can look at this and you know exactly immediately within two seconds of looking at it exactly what needs to be done uh and what is on the plate to actually continue working on these workspaces can actually be changed around if necessary this is just the specific asset overview but whenever you're getting into managing the assets themselves you want a place like this to go in and work out of on a daily basis that way you're keeping track of everything before it comes up this is a big piece for being proactive alrighty um next up we are getting into software Asset Management and I will pass this off to Chris Keyser good to be here with you all today so as we talk about a software Asset Management there are a few aspects I think that obviously we're aware of just that when we talk Asset Management there's there are some similarities between ham Sam and eam just in terms of the nomenclature we use and kind of key things that we want to keep track of so I'm going to do my best not to repeat too many things but try and really focus in on the unique aspects of Sam as it pertains to uh being proactive in your approach the key thing that we want to hit on are really the aspects of the licensing complexity that is really inherent uh with with Sam and really trying to identify you know how we manage how to measure and how to optimize these components right so when we have an uncertain compliance position knowing the the reactive way and the reactive response really comes from that you know pending audits right you know you get that notification from a publisher uh from from a software vendor that you're going to be audited to make sure that you're using what you set what you've actually purchased as opposed to already knowing where you stand right so kind of dealing with that compliance position ahead of time getting to that uh proactive approach of you know we already are aware of this we can see the data we can see our installation base our Cloud base of the products we're using and we know that we're accurately using these these Solutions there's also those aspects of overspending it leads into to that that follow-up not just from a compliance perspective but am I carrying more licenses on the Shelf and uh and therefore I'm unaware that I am overspending when I hit those points of renewal I'm not sure if we have what we need uh are we over buying are we under buying do we um end up having to add entitlements uh part way through an agreement period uh but being aware of what your threshold limits are of of how you're trending towards your maximum use case uh during a given period of time gives that information already so that you're prepared for those renewals and you're prepared for those auditing perspectives and that you know you're holding that fiscal responsibility of the product that you own as well as making sure that you're properly reclaiming underutilized product uh and that it's back on the Shelf ready for redistribution to other users in your organization and then also just the aspects of optimizing your software spend we know that there's a massive move towards uh cloud-based or subscription-based product so having an idea of what's out there not relying so much on a legacy tool set that you know half you have to constantly go to these cloud-based Solutions or log into multiple admin consoles or anything like that or just look at you know your SCCM or your InTune aspects and then try and bring all that information together that you centralize it and then try and do the counts in that way having kind of a more intuitive way to bring that data together and give you those Solutions and give you that information in a way that's consumable and so ways in which we get to that proactive approach is really that software license Reclamation that's one of the key aspects that we identify is that you're never overextended but you're also not paying for software's use when it's not actually being used and so leveraging the solution in a way and this was a key aspect for a solution apologies this is a key aspect for solutioning where a client I was working with they did have a lot of distributed software that was underutilized and because they weren't getting that use case determined they didn't know how underutilized that product was and so we're we're massively overspending they also had aspects where software renewal was key and and the streamlining of that process when we talk about contracts as well as software entitlements streamlining that process in a way that allows not only renewals to be made aware of ahead of time we know that the lead time is a key factor for renewals because there's not just the contract renegotiation there's actually the procurement the purchase and the entry of the entitlement to make sure that all of those things are in line uh that your purchases of licenses are going to align with business needs especially as you've looked at your trending of your maximum use of particular software licenses so streamlining both the contractual obligation the lead time necessary to negotiate those contracts and purchase the software as well as the entitlement entry that's ready to take over when it reaches that point of activation where the old entitlement has expired reached its end of term you have that new entitlement already ready to go so you don't have any gap between an entitlement and an entitlement start that would essentially leave that in between period in a non-compliant perspective also aspects that are very pertinent in a proactive approach is understanding what products are contained within Suites the classic examples that Industries deal with regardless of vertical but uh one of the things that we know is Microsoft 365 products there's multiple applications included in 35 Suite multiple applications included Within A Creative Cloud with Adobe suite and other solutions that essentially have multiple products so being able to understand what's associated with that in an intelligent way where the suite is defined and you know that the suite is being used as opposed to an individual license for an individual product assists with that you know compliance perspective but also ensuring that you don't end up in an overpaying scenario and then uh as well those those SAS Integrations right as we discussed so many products are moving to cloud-based and so being able to get that information through those Integrations from your SAS providers to be able to tell you uh what you need and when you need it as well as what the use case is because we know that some of those products are only used in the cloud and so we're not looking at an installation base but we still need to know that our subscription usage lines up which is ultimately going to lead to our ability to understand what our true up position is in terms of you know how many more do we need to buy as well as ensuring that we're not in that over licensed uh perspective one of the ways that this really assists is is normalization and that's really why I want to hit on that specifically is because we know that uh versioning changes drastically and so kind of having that centralized understanding of when you're in a given entitlement versus when you're you really need to be associating with a different one having that normalization to give you a Clarity of mind when you're looking at your software products so that that installation and that cloud product is properly aligned with a singular product identification so we know we're consuming the right license uh we're not guessing about whether you know just using the example here that I have on the slide whether Adobe 15 16 and 17 are actively different entitlements different licensing structures that they are essentially the same product they do fall under the same contract and entitlement agreement so that you make sure that you have data consistency which is going to assist in again accurate reconciliation which gives us that end result of knowing what we what we own and this was a major concern uh working with a client they were unable to determine which various product licenses were in a position of compliant or non-compliant because they had such a wide berth between versioning that knowing whether it was included in the product uh entitlement or not became a bit of a concern Chris let me add something to that there's also risk right so if you've got down revision software and it's normalized to something that's you know subsequently really you know a long time ago it's out of the end of cycle into support all those those things you can proactively once you see them in your environment work to take them out and move and migrate people to the most current version thus you're mitigating risk of to your infrastructure and your your network absolutely and that that's really using that life cycle approach based on this Content Library as well right because it's it's looking at the life cycles provided by those Publishers saying they're no longer supporting a particular version and so we can again be that take that proactive approach no longer supported software making sure it's going to be flagged identified removed from your environment and that you can be properly upgraded to the compliant safe supported version of product in your environment I did want to add one thing as well yeah I think we're all jumping in on this one um so uh earlier whenever I mentioned contracts and being able to associate contracts with uh assets the same thing can be done with your software entitlements as well uh and in cases where you have uh maybe extended support on certain products that are already hitting end of life but you're paying for end of support you can track that on the contracts and Associate that with the entitlements as well uh just part of being proactive on that so you're not questioning whether you still have support or not yeah absolutely and with that we'll we'll hit on so one of the other ways as well uh that I want to stress and I won't spend a whole lot of time on on this slide because I think it's relatively straightforward but understanding a centralized data approach to how you manage your software so we've having those direct integration profiles connected with with your Cloud providers um you know being able to capture things like your virtual machine installations leveraging SCCM jamf you know based on what you're using in your environment and what's capturing software and bringing those multiple data sources together so you get a full picture of what your installation base looks like both in the cloud and on local machines so that you can reconcile to your entitlements and give you that position report that's going to tell you where you need to be concerned where you need to potentially purchase more reclaim uh Etc this really is a Crux of having a proactive approach towards your software asset management and making sure that you can appropriately capture what your user base looks like whether machine based core based user-based Etc all those different licensing metrics that we have to account for in the software space just like Hardware Asset Management we also have workspaces associated with software Asset Management so again kind of being that diligent consumer of your software products and being able to see you know where our compliance positions at you know what what Publishers products where is our over licensed amount where do we need to kind of trim some of that uh over licensed number what do we need to consider about expiring products expiring entitlements products that are going to come out of uh support as we talked about leveraging that normalization and versioning to know when those products need to be restricted for no longer being supported pulled and upgraded appropriately and uh software Asset Management makes that available to you in a similar fashion to uh to Hardware asset where you can really consume and take a look at what your potential savings are uh your where your main true up costs are associated so what vendors do you really need to focus on uh to make sure that you're hitting those compliance targets and making sure that there's no real risk if they were to kind of make that phone call that an audit is going to occur and you can see there's a few different ways that we do that uh the license workbench of course is taking that data even further to really dig into not only each individual publisher but each individual product and giving you those full uh breakdowns of true up costs over license amounts by by publisher then by product as well as giving those remediation solutions that are going to help you so you know do we need to create allocations because we haven't captured them appropriately do we need to um you know reclaim restricted product are there unlicensed installations out there that we need to pull back and again just giving you the tools to um attack those situations and make sure that you're not in that position of of risk which could have a financial impact on that and so that's using the license workbench to your advantage and leveraging those calculations for your uh for your day-to-day operation of work in the space and then even doing those final kind of end of life uh things that we're talking about in terms of life cycle where we are dealing with removal candidates for any number of reasons we've talked about you know proactively reclaiming underutilized you can see low usage or restricted software it's it's no longer supported it's a product that shouldn't exist in our environment and taking advantage of of those reports that give us those end-of-life products that need to be taken out uh they're no longer going to be supported do we have a new entitlement for the latest version pending is it being renewed is it is it coming up and so uh those are multiple ways in which we can start attacking and being proactive with our use cases and software uh in our environment specifically and with that I'm going to uh to turn it over to uh to Daniel as we look into eam thank you Chris I appreciate it so to get us started talking about Enterprise asset manager I how it can be used proactively within your integration I first want to show you how it fits in relationship with software and Hardware Asset Management Within servicenow they're completely complementary as an asset managed application portfolio but in most cases the data doesn't overlap Shane talked about how you can leverage contracts across all of those and you can as well with Enterprise Asset Management you can connect contracts to your assets but mostly the data doesn't really move between the two I mean the three applications and there's a reason for that um obviously there's let me back up software of course is installed on a device which is ham and configuration management but generally speaking they're siled within their their spaces and the reason for that is because Hardware Asset Management that that is a functional it's own a hardware asset manager may not be proficient in licensing and so software asset management is different Enterprise Asset Management has some nuances as well and they are also siled although they use some of the same tables and so we'll get into that a little bit but mostly I wanted to say that administrators of eam do not need to worry about are my models going to get mixed up and those sorts of things servicenow already has solved that for you and so they proactively took care to make sure that you're going to work out just fine like ham Enterprise Asset Management has an overview and also like Sam that Chris just walked through the overview dashboard is presented by default when you open the application the cards in the top row allow you to take proactive actions these increase your data accuracy and they allow you to manage certain actions before they come a problem across the top we have asset requests transfer order line stock orders loaners rmas disposals and those are all key functions that we've already talked about in the other Arenas but here in Enterprise Asset Management you may have a critical device you know such as an MRI machine you know those big ones that you go in the room and you have to take off all your you know your metal those are those are very costly and if those are becoming to a point where they need maintenance or end of life or a specific cycle is be coming to an end you want to know that ahead of time that's a very big purchase or or a repair that you need to do for standard maintenance and so preemptive and proactive maintenance to keep things moving this dashboard allows you to do that um the um the the Bottom bar there asset counts by life cycle I I think this one is is really important because it allows you to identify clearly which assets you have coming up and then you can proactively plan for the replacement or extension of support So this dashboard is your working place it's the place that you come to to start your day it's the place that you work through and and encounter and preempt problems before they become a massive issue for you so thus the the dashboard is is your working space servicenow Enterprise Asset Management allows organizations to create and use and this is probably the most important feature of eam multi-component assets in the data structure simply put assets are sometimes made of other assets multi-component assets come together um pre-assembled from a vendor or you can put them together from assets that you have in stock those are called user assembled and for those we see organizations sourcing a mix of Assets in spare parts externally or from internal warehouses to compile common item collections into kits to treat as one asset like a blood pressure cuff a digital thermometer or a pulse ox reader that in a laptop computer these firm different manufacturers they all form a patient intake you know cart that a nurse may use when you go to your account your primary care provider or you're at an emergency room at a hospital those can be collected from different sources for a user assembled or it could be a repair kit for technicians or a real a more robust medical cart with mixed components other times it's pre-assembles the um the organization acquires these already put together sent and shipped from the vendor there may be important component such as an ultrasound connected wand a computer a monitor specialized keyboard consumable gel for ultrasounds Etc these are all repairable or replaceable and that the organization wants to track but they come fully assembled as one asset except for maybe the consumables I'm servicenow eam lets you manage individual component assets in each multi-component asset as an asset record in the inventory and as stock for installation or deployment for reservations for service maintenance for returns and swaps and they can all except for user assembled which needs to be deconstructed first but the vendor and you know the ones that come from the vendor pre-assembled those go out the door as a unit for retirement whereas the user assembled you deconstruct those and send them out as for retirement one of the most crucial and often overlooked responsibilities of an asset management team is maintaining spare parts systems requiring 24 7 uptime need hot swappable components readily available within stock rooms and on maintenance technicians service Vehicles these can be managed as stockrooms and eam and they can be used as individual stockrooms or virtual stock rooms but they are managed there in eam as stockrooms and the use of stock rules to provide a safety net to automate reorder of parts and assets when the number of in-stock units drops below are pretty determined threshold helps you to proactively stay prepared to react to a problem and so the kind of a strange way to put that but knowing that you're going to have to react when crisis comes you proactively prepare so that you have the components on hand to be available to manage those crises so it allows for minimizing response times and ensures critical components are present and ready for use well not wholly preactive I think it's important to talk about recalls the um this is a great feature with enm when a recall notice is received from a regulatory body or original equipment manufacturer prescriptive flows and eam allowed you to quickly identify impacted assets you can map them by their serial number by VIN numbers and quickly track where those asset records are and you can identify who has them then you move into the remediation phase you can choose to repair replace or follow other simple steps within the workflow to come to a conclusion to fulfill that recall um knowing that recall happens on some products within your organization if you're a fleet manager certainly vehicles have recalls if you have or a major um you know Hospital organization or Life Sciences organization many of those larger components may have some sort of recall happen to them during in their life cycle and being prepared to respond to those is a is a great feature Within eam so the tracking of service contracts I think we covered this pretty well in some of the other discussions um Shane hit it twice he talked about it in regards to Asset Management he talked to it regards in regards to software asset management and the same thing happens here you're able to track those warranties and identify when products are coming out of warranty and it's at that point you may choose to extend the warranty or you may choose to replace the I the item and so being able to associate contracts and warranty contracts especially and service contracts to your products allow you to um to identify when the when that asset is coming out of warranty and in that service contract it's um it's a big feature for um especially if you have outsourced your service service seeing of your um of your infrastructure components so if you're a hospital and you've got multiple sites a hospital organization mobile sites you've got service contracts with a provider to go out fulfill maintenance and knowing when that service contract is going to end being proactive to renew it on time it keeps your your uptime 100 up types what we're looking for there you go so refresh of assets you can see some parallels and some themes across these um three expert piece areas enterprise software and ham we want to identify the Aging assets their useful life their model life cycle their Orient OEM into support warranty and service contracts reporting and servicenow in the dashboards built right into eam tells you when these need to be refreshed and so much like the others there's that similar process um eam was built um with ham in consideration and so the many of the same features and the same workflows work um almost the exact same way in eams so if you're familiar with him eam will be simple for you so lease assets if you're leasing some of your hospital components some of your major assets knowing when the lease is nearing and there's something that we haven't talked about yet and so you want to plan for that lease end do you buy it out do you extend the lease do you collect all the equipment how it was when it was um procured and ship it back to the vendor and replace it with refresh planning for that is a crucial so proactively understanding when your leased items are going to expire so that you can preemptively and proactively plan and bring in other equipment to replace them or making sure that you are collecting all the components and identify that through an audit or inventory or physical inventory so that you can send those and ship those back to the vendor here I want to talk about some of the just recap some of the major um pieces of proactive leveraging eam proactively but I want to talk about it in the scope of a customer story a little bit here so one customer that I've worked with they manage all of their field communications and turn Styles equipment on buses and trains they're a vendor that services Transportation equipment and the the electronics that allow you to tap on and tap off with near field communications devices vending machines that sell those devices the turnstiles themselves the the pieces that are on the buses um all of that has to be managed proactively in order to keep those Transportation or the organization that runs those moving efficiently and so if you're a municipality and you've contracted with this company you don't want those devices to go down because it could cause efficiency decreases in your timeliness what they have in place is they have they identify the useful life of each of the components and they proactively replace them they fulfill them with the um you know if they're out of if they're in warranty and something breaks they proactively replace those um maintaining those warranties but they replace those under warranty and they want a budget for us at replacement as well one of the things that they also did was they added Field Services as a component to um to eam and in this case this customer was on the old asset plug-in and they built a lot of features that are now available in eam field services allows you to you know schedule work orders and and the technicians to go out and actively repair things and so bundling eam with Field Services allows your organization to not only manage the assets efficient effectively and proactively but it also allows you to facilitate the work orders and and assigning the right technicians with the right subcomponent assets or hot swappable assets on their vehicles which are stock rooms so that they you can maintain your assets appropriately so leveraging useful life and eam notifications can be created to service or replace aging equipment you can streamline your operations through scheduling that preventive maintenance and then all these things wrap up and you've and you've increased your your uptime and if you have downtime at all you minimize that time that leads us to poll number three Lauren awesome so our last poll of the day is about to launch here it goes everyone has about 20 seconds to answer and the question is based on what you've learned in this webinar now would you say you are more proactive or reactive so it looks like um the answers have definitely swayed we're now over half of our attendees are saying that they are proactive instead of reactive which is great awesome and one last piece of information this webinar I know a lot of you have been asking it is going to be recorded posted to YouTube and there will be a follow-up email with um the slides and the recording link um I know a couple of you have been asking but now we have a little bit of time for a q a session Daniel Shane and Chris have been answering some questions in the background as well so guys if there's any important questions that you want to share the answer with to the entire group feel free to and if anyone has any new questions feel free to send those in now there is one that I wanted to uh for us to discuss but before I get into that I know we've talked about uh Enterprise Asset Management Hardware so management software asset management and the technology behind uh actually being able to be proactive versus reactive with that but a lot of uh really kind of what was between the lines and what we've glossed over a little bit is the people that are needed to manage that and the processes that are needed to manage that I know if you've been on any of the conversations with us previously about Asset Management uh we beat it into the ground that process is so important whenever you're considering asset management and so I did I didn't want to leave the webinar today without expressing that and saying yes the technology is great but one of the things that really needs to be associated with that is defining a process and defining people to handle those processes to go along with it in order to be proactive yeah and and just to just to kind of join in there there was a question specifically that talked about and and it kind of goes along those lines is you know at large companies do you see the software renewals being handled by the same team that manages software entitlements and service now except for teams are they usually at least under the same larger itm umbrella or or might they be in unrelated areas and so uh it's one of those that question is so exactly what Shane just said uh because you know a big part of it is you know if you are large enough it's very common that those are going to be multiple teams of people that are engaged with their particular point of that process you know contract managers uh approvers the financial people that say yep we're going to go ahead and actually make that purchase and then um so having a process with the proper people in your organization based on its size based on its maturity level Within These stages yeah how you very well may could have multiple teams that are engaged at very specific points in these processes and you may have smaller teams where it is a little bit more you know singular team focused and they have a certain amount of authority to make purchases up to a certain amount before anybody is engaged but a big question about that is what are the people and teams that you have in your organization currently how large is it what size is the portfolio that you're managing because that's all of those things all of those people and those numbers are going to indicate the size of those teams and even whether itam as a practice is large enough in your organization to have its own teams in those disciplines underneath an itam umbrella so we've seen all kinds of those but yeah people process people process uh this technology helps support that absolutely uh and and really works to try and leverage those practices and asset management as a discipline uh for organizations but it yeah you really need to have people that own their position in those areas I'd like to hit two things real quick that are one of them is addressed in the question that you responded to in the in the Q a um Chris but I want to add to it a little bit and the other one extends this dialogue just a little bit and that is centralizing your procurement efforts for item or Asset Management as a whole because eam doesn't really fall under item it's Asset Management um where we see problems and issues with especially in the software Asset Management arena is where if you have multiple departments allowed to buy their own software you've now have increased your spend because you can't reclaim across departments very easily if those managers is saying I bought it I own it and so anywhere you can centralize that procurement and distribution of software assets into it also works well with hardware and eam as well but specifically software is is where they tend to say no I bought it I own it and you begin to have issues with that Reclamation and you lose the some of your ability to be pretty proactive um the other topic real quickly there was a question or what are some of the common pitfalls to look out for when moving your ham program from reactive to proactive and I have one nugget for you that I have seen countless times and that is you proactively create the the hardware model in your in your environment and you bring in you know you receive your device your asset through an ASN or through essential receiving or using the receive button on the purchase order form or maybe it's the you know the handheld device and you scan it that's all awesome but what happens when it's discovered is that model name is slightly different because it comes from the manufacturer and it's embedded in the Bios it's slightly different than what your your team entered into the system and so what what sometimes happens is it'll overwrite what you wrote or it may create a duplicate with a slightly different name and now you've got a problem where duplicates are being introduced so one of the recommendations that I have always had for my customer is change that transform map on your Discovery source so that it doesn't overwrite what you've written and you'll preclude duplicates and one of the questions too actually that was the question that I really wanted us to kind of discuss as a group because it there are a lot of uh steps that you can take to go from reactive to proactive but touching on the normalization piece of this I actually answered this in another one of the questions um but that Content Library that comes in from servicenow is so beneficial in the normalization process because you're not going to get 30 different names for a model that all relate to a single model you're actually going to be able to take that and normalize that in order to match that specific model and then another tie in two to the data sources that we're talking about bringing in data bringing in the configuration items from your secm or Avanti or InTune or jamf or even servicenows Discovery running it through the identification and Reconciliation engine in servicenow will assist with that deduplication effort as well so you're not going to get duplicate entries as much that's all the time throughout the webinar and with that recording and the slides a big thank you to Daniel Shane and Chris for presenting in today's webinar it was some great information and if anyone has any questions wants to connect with glide boss feel free to send us an email at info glidefast.com and we will get you connected to the right people everyone have a great rest of your day thank you thank you [Music]