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I had a great discussion about Windows 7 today. Two things were immediately obvious. One is a little scary, but the other is pretty exciting (for geekettes like me, at any rate).
The scary thing is that for those XP houses that don’t have Software Assurance on their desktop Operating System licenses, options are starting to [...]

I’ve just spotted a really good article about building the business case for ITAM on the ITAM Review website. It’s actually an interview with Jenny Schuchert of IAITAM.
It really struck a chord as in real life I’m in the process of building just such a business case for ITAM. I recognised many of the ‘gotchas’ [...]

I was glad to be on holiday on Monday morning so that I didn’t have to walk into work on Monday morning to have my nose gleefully rubbed in England’s thumping Ashes victory over Australia at the weekend. But I haven’t escaped entirely, as, while kindly publishing my article “Sam is a Team Sport” on [...]

So, you’re an IT Asset Manager, and you have lots of people telling you how important IT Asset Management is, and how important your role is, while asking you to design and implement effective ITAM processes. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll keep bumping up against regular road-blocks and people who’s actions speak rather [...]

So to finish off the topic of books of record, I thought it would be interesting to provide a real world example of how we leverage an existing book of record, as well as explore some of the issues we encountered while we set up the system.
Employee data from SAP
My company uses SAP as its [...]

This is easy! Translated into ITIL-speak, a book of record is a configuration management database (CMDB). CMDBs hold the records of every single piece of relevant data, also known as configuration items (CIs).
Welcome to ITIL!!
In the old version of ITIL  (aka v.2) there was an idealised situation where an organisation had just one CMDB, which [...]

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is that I work with and develop strong relationships with people and departments outside IT. One of the benefits of this is that once we understand how they work and what data sources they use, we can use those resources to help us operate more [...]