Asset management vs Asset administration ?

Managing and controlling corporate assets is now a technical and economical prerequisite; IT managers increasingly have to also be finance managers. Asset administration, asset management… Which tools, for which objectives and how not to get confused?

Asset administration allows the administrator to technically follow up its IT assets and to allocate the corporate IT resources. To do so, he will use various tools that meet his requirements:  the automatic inventory tool is one of them, as well as network technical supervision, remote deployment or remote access tools. We come across products such as Intel LanDesk, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, HP Openview, Microsoft Systems Management Server, Novell Zenworks...

• Non-IT asset inventory
• Software inventory
• License management
• Software deployment
• Desktop configuration
• Alert management
• Integration
• Reporting tools
• Number of supported clients
• Antivirus
• Remote access
• Documentation

• So, asset administration provides information about the network, the number of stations, the use of licenses, etc. It will allow companies to define the administration of all their resources according to their specific operation rules, from a central unit.

  However, let us not be naive! These tools manage neither service quality, nor moves history logs. They also do not manage the financial aspects and therefore do not answer to the "five Ws" (What? Who? Where? When? and Why?: Which equipment is available to the company? Who is using it? Where can we find it? When was this equipment delivered to the company? And finally, why has it been moved?).

Asset management is a real-time monitoring of technical corporate assets, whether IT or non-IT. It provides a general overview of the state, the follow-up and the costs of machines used in the company. It will not only list the various types of machine existing in the company, their number, their location and the software that are installed on them but also to know their manufacture year, their acquisition year, providers' names, etc.

Asset management is both an administrative and technical task: it provides knowledge on corporate assets and offers an extended technical overview as well as a financial and administrative overview.  It will be core to users' assistance or help desk, maintenance, budget management, or company tax management...

Asset management solutions will allow for a more heterogeneous asset repository, which naturally tends to grow organically, in a uncontrolled fashion, and then for a limitation of costs by making the corporate procurement and service policy easier.

Asset administration operates in photographic mode (supervision and one-off inventory) whereas asset management provides a more "cinematographic" vision with a permanent follow-up of actions (daily update by technicians). This is the IT systems accountancy.

To conclude, an asset management solution supersedes the asset administration initiative by organizing the information collected. Editors have understood this and this is why today they offer gateways to asset administration software (remote access, inventory reconciliation, etc).