To be completely honest, I’ve never been much of a tradeshow enthusiast.  Between a pesky L5 vertebrae (I’m 6′2″ and no, I don’t fly first class), the difficulty keeping up with the torrent of email, and a seemingly futile quest to perfect my “elevator pitch” on the tradeshow floor, I’d rather my time out of the office be spent sipping Mai-Tais on a sandy beach.

That said, this year’s IAITAM conference was an exception to the typical tradeshow.  The attendees with whom I spoke were genuinely enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable.  Many have lived through multiple IT asset management (ITAM) initiatives and technologies due to job changes, mergers and acquisitions, and shifts in organizational priorities. The sessions were exceptionally well-attended and covered a wide array of ITAM topics from high-level educational topics to detailed technical discussions.

In addition, I had the privilege of delivering a talk on Wednesday entitled “Software Identification: Present Realities and Future Possibilities“.  The presentation covered the following areas: (more…)

Very nice blog post by Jenny Schuchert of the International Association of IT Asset Managers (IAITAM) concerning how to build the business case for IT asset management (ITAM).  In particular, I agree with her philosophy regarding the two general approaches to selling ITAM most likely to succeed. 

The first approach is to link ITAM to a particular event or known issue, and build the business case around resolving the issue or preventing such an event from happening again in the future.  Schuchert remarks that while this approach may not necessarily target areas where the most significant savings may be obtained, it may be the most politically savvy—and therefore practical—approach for obtaining buy-in from skeptics.  Plus, once a successful program is in place, the additional savings generally speak for themselves and will likely lead to subsequent reprioritization of program goals and emphasis. 

The second approach Schuchert mentions is to focus the business case on the multitude of ways a well-structured ITAM program can lead to cost savings, presented in terms of potential return on investment. This approach, if presented as a strategic initiative, is more likely to succeed among executive stakeholders that have demonstrated a commitment to exploring ways of uncovering long-term organizational savings. 

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I recently attended the 2009 IAITAM Annual Conference, Las Vegas style. And although I’m sure everyone was equally tired of the “What happens in Vegas …” response to just about any statement that could be taken two ways, the conference as a whole was great. It’s an event that impresses me more every year: solid attendance (even in today’s challenging economy), an increasingly well-educated technical community regarding overall IT asset management practices, a growing understanding of the value of ITAM beyond just compliance, and a really great venue for vendors, service providers, practitioners, and end users to get together to share their experiences.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Bringing Green Together” which provided a background not only for the environmentally “green” areas such as reuse and disposal, but also the financial “green” realized by being ITAM-efficient, both with respect to purchasing assets and how efficiently those assets are utilized. There were over three dozen presentations on everything from vendor management to tools to internal evangelism, along with a number of end-user and ITAM practitioner case studies. There were also several opportunities to get current on the state of the ISO ITAM standards (the 19770 series). An update on the “-2″ tagging standard (which became official just a couple of weeks ago) was presented by Steven Klos, and the “-3″ entitlements group (led by John Tomeny) used the conference as an opportunity to convene its members and keep plugging away at it.

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