Agencies take inventory of IT assets
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Labor uses bar codes and readers to keep track of its IT assets, the department's John Saracco says.
Rick Steele
- GSA will continue to award SmartBuy contracts to consolidate software licenses.
- Agency enterprise architectures will provide the road map of future hardware and software needs, and those needs could be rolled into SmartBuy.
- The interagency working group may develop governmentwide recommendations for asset management standards.
'We are seeing more agencies look at lifecycle asset management,' said Robert Kaehler, general manager of Sunflower Systems of San Ramon, Calif., an asset management software vendor. 'The goal is total asset visibility, so you know at a moment's notice what you have and where it is.'
GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy is forming an interagency team to develop best practices for managing IT assets. The objective is to create a database of IT assets so agencies can make unused hardware and software available for use by other federal offices.
Officials also said agencies' attention to inventories will improve their patch and configuration management. Robert McNeil, a senior analyst for management services with Forrester, said organizations buy 5 percent to 10 percent more software licenses than they need. But with better asset management, agencies should have a better handle on their IT work, human resources and finances'and therefore be able to better target their buys, he said.
Although many agencies are falling short on their inventories, a handful of agencies, such as the Labor Department and Social Security Administration, have IT asset efforts well under way.
No codes'radio
At SSA, for instance, officials are testing radio frequency identification tags to track IT assets on 128 desktop systems and 15 servers at the Office of Property Management in Baltimore.
Gary Orem, an SSA IT specialist, said RFID tags are replacing the bar codes employees previously used to mark hardware and software.
Using an RFID scanner, SSA employees can collect in a matter of seconds 128 to 200 characters of information about each device, including manufacturer, serial number and name of the user.
'This will save us at least 40 percent just in the time it used to take to read the bar codes,' Orem said.
Labor's asset management system, like SSA's, is saving time and improving accuracy. The department's CIO Office has installed Oracle Assets software, which more than 400 employees use. The application relies on bar codes, which are scanned or manually typed into the database. Labor IT workers finished installing the system in June, replacing 25 separate systems.
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