Gartner’s London summit message: Make ITAM important!

Gartner’s IT Financial, Procurement and Asset Management rolled into London last week (11th and 12th September 2013), and promptly kicked off on an ominous note: Stewart Buchanan’s opening keynote warning that certain roles in IT, including that of the IT Asset Manager, risk becoming obsolete.

As the two day event progressed, however, it became increasingly clear that Gartner’s analysts don’t see ITAM as a complete anachronism. It is important, however, that it evolves with the technology and practices around it. Asset Management needs to become a key strategic tool to the business. For those of us who have been blogging on this theme for some time, and who have witnessed the best ITAM professionals in the industry delivering huge results from this approach, it is great to hear Gartner emphasising it so strongly.

Research Director Victoria Barber stressed the power of a strong “symbiotic relationship” between the Asset Management function, and IT’s financial controllers. “Finance needs to understand how it can leverage the data from Asset; Asset Management needs to understand how to support it”.

Barber’s fellow Research Director Patricia Adams described the evolving role of the IT Asset Management team in an increasingly virtualised environment. By Monday morning, she advised, the ITAM team should ensure that it is part of the process for spinning up a virtual machine.

Moving forward, Adams continued, they need to be aware of emerging technologies and preparing for potential adoption. This needs good awareness of what is going on in the business: “You want to make sure the asset team has the skills to work with the config team, to work with the virtualisation team, to understand what those teams are doing”.

As Buchanan concluded in a later session, companies should “use ITAM to continually improve and optimise both IT operations and the business use of IT”.

To this audience, at least, Gartner’s message is an encouraging one.