. When I was little I had a piggy bank complete with a requisite combination lock (needed to keep my younger brother from pilfering). Each week, on Friday evening when I got my 50 cent allowance, I'd lock myself in my bedroom, twist and turn the combination until I got it right and then I counted my prized stash of cash. I always understood just how much it would amount to, but I counted it nonetheless. My buddy, on the flip side, never used his piggy bank; he put his quarters in his pockets and usually lost them within several days.

Over time, I started to earn more money through babysitting and odd jobs, but the rite never changed - lock the door, open the safe and recount my money. As I reflect, I think about the time I wasted re-counting my cash but I also remember the delight I experienced each time as I dreamed and planned the best way to spend my bread! It would have been great to push a button and have a “piggy bank statement” printed at any time confirming that my money was where it will be and how much I had available. It would have been better still to get “piggy interest” on my quarters! That would be real optimization!

These memories came flooding back to me when I was pondering the subject of IT asset management sydney and how ineffectively some businesses track and manage PCs and other IT equipment. Demands for increased staff productivity and greater return on INFORMATION technology investments have pushed the need for better asset management and critical solutions.

Some IT managers believe that software licensing concerns are simplest to address using a standard corporate image (a COMPUTER configured with standard software applications deployed to all consumers within the company). While it may look simpler, you have to ask “what happens to standardization once that PC has been delivered to the final user?” I'll let you know, in several businesses the end user instantly starts to transform the typical image to the stage there's no longer any homogeny within the company assets.

I really like living in the new millennium, the whole exercise of gathering information on IT assets has been revolutionized. Now, in a matter of a few clicks of the mouse, a good asset management australia application can offer up to the moment information needed to arrange for an upgrade. Not only can these tools provide information on hardware, but also software versions, patches, etc. Having accurate data obtainable in a dynamic system proves to be a tremendous forecasting timesaver and may even be used, among other things, to reduce virus incidents by identifying systems that are in risk. Besides planning for upgrades, simply keeping track of assets that appear to forever grow legs and walk away on their own can become an intimidating process.

Another bright spot for IT managers who use asset management tools effectively is improved efficiency in the help desk. IDC reported that downtime can be reduced by 10% and person hours on recovery can be decreased by 22% for organizations that practice good asset management. I read another figure that touted a 25% decrease in average help desk call time. This enables the closing of more trouble tickets daily and gets end users back to work quicker.

I definitely remember the days when a help desk call started out with concerns for example “What type of PC do you have? What version of Windows are you running? Did you install anything new lately?” And if you are laughing now, it's because you know the response is always “NO! I haven't installed anything!” End users never confess to installing or doing something that may have possibly caused their system to misbehave!

With today's tools, support staff can easily see hardware and software configurations with no end user interaction thus saving time on each support call. Having this IT “x-ray vision” debunks the myth that standard images are simpler to support because a typical picture normally fails to remain standard after deployment. Being able to find out what has happened to morph that PC really does make support easier and faster Clicking Here!