Two hundred laptops, nobody sure where
An audit asks a firm: how many laptops do you own, who has them, and how many people may use your software? The answers are three different guesses.
The firm pays for 80 software seats nobody uses. Asset management would have found that in a minute.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Asset | anything the organisation owns that has value |
| Lifecycle | all the stages from choosing something to getting rid of it |
| Constraint | a limit, such as a small budget or a deadline |
| Sourcing | finding and choosing where to buy something |
| Integration | making a new thing work with what is already there |
| Decommission | to remove a device from service for good |
| Redeploy | to move an asset to a new user or a new job |
| Licence | permission to use software, often for a set number of users |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can describe the four stages of asset management and keep a licence register.
Starter
Have a go
Starter
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Identify and plan
Start with need. What do users need? What does the organisation need? What are the constraints, such as money and time? How will it be deployed?
Planning first stops two mistakes: buying what nobody needs, and not buying what they do.
Acquire and implement
Source the asset: compare suppliers, prices and support. Then integrate it into the current system. A new laptop must join the domain. New software must work with the old programs. Log the asset and give it a tag.
Add a laptop to the register
echo "tag,owner,status" > register.csv && echo "LAP-0007,Amira,in use" >> register.csv && cat register.csvA command for the lesson’s lab terminal. It is shown here and not run.
Check: planning and buying
Have a go
Check: planning and buying
4 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.