Taking it Inventory –network Inventory Management

Why Do I need to Inventory My Network?

Network inventory management is a must for efficient control of your computer and software asset inventory. An automated inventory is the only way to be truly up to date — IT systems change continuously during their lifecycle. Hardware components may be added or removed, software installed or uninstalled. Even in small IT networks, there will always be growth and change and managing IT inventory manually is practically impossible.

The goal of inventory management is to have a complete, up-to-date and accurate view of all network components, including PCs, servers, printers, hubs, routers, switches and software, etc. At a minimum, IT inventory management should tell you the device class and what’s installed on the device. For any given time frame, inventory management provides the “actual” state of all infrastructure components. This means that you know what you have and where it is located ? across the entire enterprise network.

How is IT Asset Management Related to My Network Inventory?

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is built upon your network inventory. IT Asset Management covers the lifecycle of the IT assets in your inventory, from the actual acquisition through deployment, upgrades, patches, etc.  By deploying an IT Asset Management solution, you can do even more than manage your network and desktop inventory. You can manage the physical, contractual and even financial aspects of those computer assets. Implemented intelligently, IT inventory and ITAM will help your organization to reduce costs, improve service and reduce risk.

How Does SAManage help me with my Network Inventory?

Taking an inventory of your organization’s network is an important process.  For an organization of almost any size, network inventory should ideally be an automated collection of information from your network.

With SAManage deployed on your network, easily retrieve up to date information on what software titles and hardware components are installed across your network. With visibility into where they are used, and when they are used, you will have improved IT asset management capabilities. No software or servers are required, and using our service is simple.

SAManage is a comprehensive, scalable IT Asset Management solution.

Cost Management Tip: Understand your Operations Cycle

The more efficiently you can fill orders the more money you get to keep from each sale. If you sell an extra $10 product you may only get to keep $1 or $2 after you finish paying for the product, warehouses, salaries, etc. But if you can find a way to do something for $10 less than you’re doing it now you get to keep the whole $10.

This is one of the basic views of business from an operations, or orders fulfillment perspective. It is commonly broken down into four main steps:

1. Sell a product or service

2. Source the parts and labor

3. Build the product or prepare the service

4. Deliver the product or service to the customer

The end goal is to provide a solution that the customer is happy with so you can collect payment.

Sell

The selling stage of the fulfillment cycle is lead generation, conversion and closing all rolled into one. From the perspective of the operations team (the team that needs to deliver whatever the sales team has sold, or fulfill the order) a sale is what gets the cycle started.

Source

Sourcing is the activity of gathering together all of the raw materials and labor required to fulfill the order. The sourcing team is responsible for purchasing raw materials such as nuts and bolts and paper and ink. The definition of raw materials differs greatly depending on the business. For a nuts and bolts company, the raw materials will be iron and steel to make the nuts and bolts. For an airline raw materials would include planes, fuel, food, baggage carts, etc. Raw materials refer to things that you buy in finished form from an outside supplier, and then use in the process of putting together your own product or providing your own service.

The other side of sourcing is the people side. If you want to make nuts and bolts, or if you want to start an airline, it is obviously not enough to gather up a bunch of raw materials. They are useless without people to turn them into something. You also need to source people. Do you hire permanent staff? Do you sign short term contracts? What skills do the people need? This is all part of the sourcing process.

In short, sourcing means getting together all the labor and all the materials required to get the job done. Good sourcing teams are up front planners that arrange a lot of things, and spend a lot of money on raw materials. Wherever a lot of money is being spent, there is also a lot of opportunity for savings. Supply chain optimization to decrease sourcing costs is big business, and worth the effort.

Build

Building is the process of taking all the raw materials and labor and using them to create a product or service.

For a products business you take the raw materials, turn them into a product, put them in a package, and pile them in the warehouse or on the shipping dock to be delivered to the customer.

For a services business building is getting things ready. If your business is providing business training for adults, do you just walk in and give the training? No, you take your raw materials (paper, computer, name tags, CDs, pens, props, etc) and you build them into a training course.

Simply put, building is turning raw materials into something presentable to your customer. You can build a product. You can build a service.

Building things costs a lot of money, particularly in process costs and labor costs (remembering that materials are already provided by the sourcing team). Optimizing your processes to use less labor, and controlling the salaries of big teams of people (like factory workers) have big impacts on the viability of your business. This is particularly true in very large organizations.

Deliver

Delivery is getting your product or service into your customer’s hands. The range of delivery methods varies greatly across businesses, but it is always an important customer interaction that has a huge impact on the satisfaction of your customer.

Delivery is the part of the process that the customer sees. The customer doesn’t see you order raw materials, or build your products. The customer sees whatever is delivered, and the people that deliver it. People judge your business by the delivery experience at least as much as they do by the quality of your products and services. A good delivery team is a vital step in starting the work of getting the next sale.

Customers buy perception, and remember what they see. They don’t see the sourcing team. They don’t see the building team. They see the delivery team. Make sure the delivery team has what it needs to deliver a great customer experience. People judge your company by the people they come in contact with, not by all the great people they never get to meet.

Summary

The operations cycle consists of 4 main steps: Sell, Source, Build, and Deliver. This perspective of business is primarily focused at looking inside the business for better ways to do things that will result in top quality products and services at reasonable costs.

This view of the business cycle tends to put focus on optimizing process control across the business to provide better quality, and lower cost. Two things customers love.

How it Asset Management Can Save You Money

Proper management of your IT assets can help you save money and reduce your overall IT costs. According to IAITAM, proactive IT asset management can reduce your IT costs by up to 25%. By knowing which computers and software are used across your company, and matching the inventory information against your financial and contractual records you can make better IT decisions and get more out of your IT budget. IT Asset Management provides the following benefits:

1. Gain control over your assets, know which assets exist on your network, their configuration and the changes to these assets. A good asset management system would help you easily analyze the information to make decisions.

2. Implement procedures that will save you money a good IT asset management system would help you create and enforce policies and procedures that will save you money. You can implement software usage policies, standard hardware configurations, asset request processes and other processes that would help you extract more value from your assets.

3. Make better IT decisions by organizing your IT assets inventory and aligning it with your financial records and contracts you can better IT decisions. For example, you can better prepare for a contract renewal by knowing what you actually use and need to renew, what terms you negotiated in the previous contract or which computers are part of a hardware lease that is expiring soon.

4. Reduce help-desk and support costs by providing your support personal with detailed asset configuration you help them provide quicker issue resolution, and reduce your IT support costs.

5. Detect risks to your IT assets – analyze your IT assets to detect any potential risks such as missing security patches or improper anti-virus / anti-spyware protection.

6. Ensure regulatory and software license compliance.

To learn more about IT Asset Management for Small Business owners, and how getting started has become easier with on-demand IT Asset Management, visit SAManage at www.SAManage.com today and sign-up for a free 30-days trial of our service.

How Software Asset Management Can Help You Save Money

Simply put, Software Asset Management is a business process that can help you reduce your licensing costs and optimize your software assets. The business benefits of Software Asset Management are:

Reduce software licensing costs – only purchase/renew licenses for software that is used. Track all your license rights, such as upgrade, downgrade and transfer rights to optimize the way you account for and use your software assets.

Reduce help desk costs – on average, 50% of the time spend troubleshooting computer issues is spent on obtaining the computer configuration

Minimize unauthorized software usage, security risks – SAM empowers you to use the right software for you. Ensuring that your employees are using only authorized software helps increase productivity and avoid security risks.

Reduce business and legal risk due to not meeting regulatory requirements, or not complying with software vendor license agreements.

Better negotiation capabilities with your software vendors – knowing exactly what you have and what you need, as well as the number of licenses you need and your current license rights puts you in control in your next license negotiation.

Software Asset Management can help you reduce your overall software licensing costs by only purchasing software that you use and need, organize your licensing assets and keep track of your licenses agreements, terms and renewal dates. It is a process that helps you know which software is installed and used across your enterprise, and minimize unauthorized software usage. You can use it to better manage your software assets from a business perspective, reduce the cost of software licensing and improves your software asset utilization.

Search-n-organize: State-of-the-art Low-budget Document Management Solutions

http://www.artifactmanager.com/papers/ArtifactManager_Organize-n-Search.pdf

WHITE PAPER
Organize-n-Search
State-of-the-art Low-budget Document Management Solutions

“We are living in the information age… The information explosion…” We have heard it so many times that have stopped paying any attention to it. However, information penetrates into every aspect of our lives. We are constantly trying to acquire new knowledge and looking for opportunities to benefit from it.

Users who actively work with documents and information, frequently face the problems related to search, organization and efficient use of documents. Copyeditors, writers, journalists, researchers, analysts, consultants, lawyers, medical workers, students, all run into the same challenges at home and at work.

This paper is intended for a wide range of people, who, for personal or business need, work with a large number of documents and other information. We take a close look at the problems of information management, benefits of using advanced technologies in the low-budget personal information management system, as well as system selection criteria to meet personal and professional needs of information workers.

Challenges of Document Management

Nowadays big part of information is stored in a form of text: books, articles, reports, memo, notes, specifications, descriptions, whitepapers, and manuals, not to mention a huge amount of time sensitive information, such as invoices, bank statements, schedules, contracts, and tax returns.

Yesterday, papers, photo albums, music disks, and video tapes were kept in drawers, boxes, and cabinets. But the development of personal computers and Internet has started the era of digital information.

Development of electronic formats has significantly increased system storage capacity and allowed accumulation of large information volumes. However, recent developments in the fields of computer systems and data storage have led to a new question: how can we effectively manage digital information?

Recent studies by IDC (Susan Feldman, Joshua Duhl, Julie Rahal Marobella, Alison Crawford. The Hidden Costs of Information Work. March 2005) revealed that on average 13 hours of every 40-hour work week are spent on creating documents. 9.5 hours per week are spent on searching for information, while almost 9.6 hours on analyzing the information. 6.5 hours are wasted on searching for information that is never found leading to the need to recreate the content. Formatting of information between different applications takes about 3.8 hours per week, whereas version control related issues take 2.2 hours.

Issues, effects and implications of information management are summarized in the following Figure.

Issues

Slow search
Search without desired results
Redundant search
Recreation of documents
Difficulty of use of the found information

Effects

Employer
Unplanned for wasted time
Work slowdown
Decrease in productivity
Decline in quality

Employee
Increased workload
Negative attitude towards work
Decline in the level of satisfaction from the job

Implications

Missed deadlines
Project failure
Lost revenue
Loss of employee

Figure 1: Issues, effects and implications of information management

* What is the best way to organize the information to find it faster in the future?
* How to easily find information inside of large volume of materials?
* How to find documents that are related?
* How to save the search results and view them in the future?
* How to share found information with colleagues and friends?
* How to effectively use found information?

Importance and significance of those problems are major factors that stimulate the development of new solutions and information management systems. Information Retrieval, Data and Knowledge Bases, Document & Content Management, to name a few, are the branches of information technologies that deal with the problems of information management.

Solutions to Document Management Problems

Solutions to document management problems are tightly linked to the following challenges: improving the efficiency of information access, improving quality and speed of search, improving the efficiency of information processing, improving reliability and safety of storage.

Efficient Access to Information

It is necessary to quickly and easily extract the text documents which meet certain criteria from an array of available information. These requirements are diverse and constantly changing. For example, original sources for articles, data for reports, textbooks to prepare for the exam, patient’s medical records, or precedents for court case – all have high, but temporary value to resolve the pressing challenges.

After finding the required documents, working through them, and creating a number of versions, the user will need to consolidate and store the results. For example, one may need to save a set of documents, or add comments to a set of documents for future use. One possible solution to meet the changing needs is to place a document in several groups. A group could consist of documents on certain topic, papers of the same author, articles of the same journal issue, previous versions of the article, or materials used to write an article.

Searching and organizing information in a meaningful way takes up a lot of time. To shorten the cycle and make a process more enjoyable, a number of solutions have been proposed.

Quality and Speed of Search

In some cases users can find the documents they need by using a query – a word or combination of words that might be in those documents.

In the past, search required scanning of all files on the computer drives and going through their content comparing the key words with words in the document. This called for the sequential scanning of all files for each request. But increased size and number of files have dramatically slowed down the search process. In addition, morphology was neglected and multiple queries were needed to find the document.

Best solutions for effective search of information are based on search engines and information retrieval technologies. The entire collection of files is pre-processed and the information about the documents and key words is stored in the index files. Indexing works for various file formats and takes into account all possible forms of the same word. This “smart” pre-processing mechanism significantly accelerates the search and improves its quality.

Organization

In many cases the user is unaware of the words contained in the document of interest. It’s also possible that the user is not able to generate a query that returns desired outcomes, or the number of documents is too large, or some documents may not contain the right words. In these scenarios the user has no choice but manually look for a desired document. To save the results of manual search, many use the systems designed specifically for organizing the information.

Simplified versions of organization systems use fields and registration cards to link the documents and accompanying information (date, author, title, a brief description, etc.) However, field sets are fixed and limited, and often do not allow grouping of the documents to accommodate changing needs of the users.

Enhanced systems use a hierarchy of folders (catalogs, or directories). However, in most cases, when a document belongs to multiple topics, the user may end up facing several problems. For example, in the hierarchy of file system folders, a document can not be assigned to several folders without duplication. In this case, duplication may result in an unnecessary increase of information volume as well as inconsistencies in content after one of the documents has been modified.

Top notch tools to organize the information use multiple hierarchical categorizations which came from the domain of knowledge bases and ontologies.

Version Control

Authoring of a complex document is a long process and requires many edits, corrections and rewritings. To avoid confusion, it is necessary to maintain a history of changes in the document. The old-fashion solution was to save the changes in the separate file with a unique name, which often resulted in lost files, more storage space as well as difficulties in finding the right version of the document. These and other problems related to tracking the history of the content, storing different versions of the document, and returning to its previous versions have been addressed by the invention of the versioning systems. These systems are designed to provide access to the previous versions and history of changes.

Figure 2: Authoring a document

Effective Work with Information

Search, organization, and version control, by themselves, significantly simplify the process. But till now, most of these functions were only provided by separate software tools. The first program implements search. The second program organizes information. The third program edits it. The fourth program keeps version history. And so on.

A user has to run multiple applications, toggle between them, import and export documents, and move and copy the files. This process dramatically slows down the work, decreases productivity, increases pressure, and therefore leads to mistakes and reduces work satisfaction.

To eliminate unnecessary labor and reduce the amount of wasted time, one needs an integrated solution that combines search, editing and version control functionality.

Privacy, Security and Reliability of Storage

It goes without saying that information is a valuable resource that is expensive to produce. It is necessary to not only provide a safe storage for the entire set of documents, but also protect valuable information from computer hardware and software failures, as well as human errors. In addition, the confidentiality of information should be preserved – unauthorized users should not have access to the information without the permissions from the owner. However, if necessary, the results of the work have to be publishable to third parties.

Earlier applications stored files on the secure computers in a folder structure. Individual users had access to specific folders, which required a complex access rights management policy. Thus the information was often duplicated on the users’ computers, causing many problems related to information relevance.

To address the above mentioned problems, modern document management systems store information in centralized repositories, which make it easy to store, retrieve, manipulate and modify documents. Advanced repositories support storage and processing of multiple documents and file formats including, but not limited to: text (Word, Acrobat, Open Office, etc.), spreadsheet, fax, e-mail, audio, and images.

Documents, images and other information stored in the electronic repository are easily accessible and retrievable. The losses associated with errors in streamlining, organizing, and placing of the documents are drastically reduced and possibly even eliminated. In addition, each document keeps not only a history of who viewed it, made changes and what changes were made, but also other information about the document, such as title, contents, themes, etc.

Valuable Benefits of Document Management Systems

Thus, state-of-the-art information and document management systems
* reduce information processing time (multi-category systems allow for fast categorization of the incoming information and re-organization of existing information)
* reduce the time required to access the information (full-text search tools and category system, history and version control provide an easy and quick way to find information)
* reduce the time required to create a document (integration of search, organization, modification and version control features in a single platform allow the user to work on new and existing documents in a more effective manner)
* eliminate the cases of lost data (electronic repositories automatically capture all document changes and allow the user to restore the history of changes)

By leveraging a wide range of features provided by information management tools, one may free up the time normally spent on unnecessary tasks and focus on more important activities. As a result, the use of information management systems increases the quality of work.

Criteria for Selecting the Right Document and Information Management System

Flexible categorization: The system must support the categorization of documents to meet specific requirements of the user. To do that, the system should include the following features:
* Flexible categorization (user should be able to create any categories or topics and place the documents there)
* Hierarchical categorization (high level topics that consist of more specific topics)
* Multiple categorization (the same document might be included in several topics, categories or groups of documents)
* Ability to merge related files in a package
Flexible grouping that keeps the history of the results simplifies future access to documents inside of assigned topics, and allows one to see the relationships between documents found in one category.

Powerful search tools: The system should be able to perform a full-text search of information by query which contains individual terms or phrases. The search feature should
* be fast, which implies indexing
* support full-text search for all common formats – pdf, doc, odt, etc.
* take into an account the differences in spelling of various grammatical forms of the words
* work with individual repositories, categories and themes (topics)
The above mentioned features allow the user to effectively query the documents, provide a fast access to desirable documents, and make it possible to work on documents that have not yet been classified.

Central repository: The system should be able to store information in a centralized repository that allows:
* storing high volumes of documents
* creation of multiple personal repositories
* protection of confidential information
Documents in the system should not be viewable by other applications. Only the owner of the information should be able to grant the access to the repository. Repositories not only eliminate the need to manually create the files and directories, but they also restrict access to information, tighten security and improve reliability by providing backup, recovery and data protection tools.

Composite documents: The system should be able to work with the collection of files as a single unit, allowing the user to make changes to the set of documents. This functionality helps to improve usability and makes it easier to work with documents that consist of multiple files – for example, html documents with pictures.

Figure 3: Composite document

Document registration cards: The system should support the functionality of attaching useful information, such as name, purpose, abstract, comments, author, date of creation and modification, etc. to the document or file. This type of information helps to increase the accessibility of the documents. The information about the document should be flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the user and the information unit type.

Supported file types: The system should be able to support a wide range of common document types and formats, including Microsoft Office (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc.), Open Office, as well as the formats of scanned documents and images.

Versioning system: The system should be able to support multiple versions of the document, track history and changes in chronological order – who, when, why modified the document and which changes were made. If needed, this functionality enables the user to work on one of the previous versions of the document.

Navigation history: The system should record the sequence of events describing the steps the user took while working on the documents and have that information available to the user at any given time.

Easy-to-use interface: The system should provide a user-friendly interface that includes intuitive navigation as well as the panels displaying categories, history, versions, and search results. All of these will dramatically enhance user experience and therefore increase user satisfaction.

Modern technology and open architecture: The system should be built using the latest technologies. The architecture should be
* scalable – support an unlimited number of repositories, documents stored in a
* repository, categories and their levels, as well as a fast search through unlimited amount of information
* modular and expandable – provide a foundation for rapid development and fast delivery of new features requested by the users
* cross-platform – compatible with Windows, Linux, and MacOS operating systems
This allows the system to grow organically and reduce the time to deliver the new features to meet growing user needs.

Integrated solution: The user’s objective is an effective execution of her or his work. To accomplish this goal the user has to go through repetitive cycles of work with information and documents. These cycles may include:
* Gathering of the information for a document
* Analyzing information
* Creating the outline and the first draft of the document
* Placing the document to the repository
* Making changes to the document
* Preparing the document for future use
* Searching for other materials that will be used in a new version of the document
These phases are executed repeatedly to improve the quality of the document, bringing it to the desired results. A good system should be able to integrate the above mentioned features so that the user can complete the sequence of document development tasks in a single system. This implements agile document management.

Low cost of the ownership: Adoption of a document management system can save any organization millions of dollars. At the same time, the scale and broad functionality of corporate systems leads to the high cost of ownership unaffordable for personal users. It’s also important to note that a user might not need all the features available in a corporate system and therefore will only get overwhelmed by its complexity. The cost of a personal information management system should be low, but at the same time it has to provide the right set of features to match the needs of individual user. The system should be easy to install and run on any personal computer.

Artifact Manager

Artifact Manager is an advanced document and information management system. This simple, convenient, low-budget solution has all of the features of the enterprise information management system that helps to achieve higher productivity levels through a better management of personal documents and information.

Required Features Artifact Manager
* Flexible categorization Yes
* Powerful search tools Yes
* Centalized repository Yes
* Composite documents Yes
* Document metadata Yes
* Wide range of file types Yes
* Version control Yes
* History Yes
* User-friendly interface Yes
* Modern technology and architecture Yes
* Integrated soluton Yes
* Low-cost ownership Yes

Figure 4: Features of Artifact Manager

Artifact Manager is the first enterprise-class personal platform for document and information management. It combines a powerful search, flexible organization, reliable storage, and convenient interface in a single easy-to-use environment.

Download Artifact Manager now at

http://www.ArtifactManager.com/downloads.html

No obligation of buying, no cumbersome registration, no spam

http://www.artifactmanager.com/papers/ArtifactManager_Organize-n-Search.pdf

Environmental Impact Assessment – Effective Cost Management

The cost of carrying out an environmental impact assessment can be a significant part of the planning and design cost of a development project. Notoriously, the EIA costs are difficult to predict at the outset of the project. This uncertainty is mainly due to an initial lack of knowledge of the environmental baseline conditions on the development site. As the project progresses, site knowledge increases gradually and new costs may emerge while some risks may reduce. Particularly in the current economic climate, there is a need to have a clear understanding of the costs and the risks of the environmental impact assessment at an early stage in the project.

The first step to effective cost management of an environmental impact assessment is to carry out a thorough EIA scoping study. The outcome of the EIA scoping study should be a clear understanding of the basic site characteristics and the likely environmental risks and sensitivities. It should also provide a clear programme on how to address the issues that have been identified in the further environmental impact assessment.

Following a carefully undertaken EIA scoping study, uncertainties remain. These uncertainties are however much more manageable. For instance, during the EIA scoping study it was identified that no important archaeological features have been recorded in the wider area around a site. The following step that is proposed is to carry out a geophysical site survey. Depending on the outcome of the survey there may be a requirement to carry out an intrusive investigation in the form of an excavation.

There are three uncertainties that will determine the final cost for archaeological work as part of the environmental impact assessment. Firstly there is the uncertainty about the exact cost to carry out the geophysical survey. The error margin on this should be relatively small as it is a fairly defined activity. The second uncertainty relates to whether or not the results of the survey indicate the need of further work. This is a yes or no issue, where the uncertainty relates to the chance that further work is required. Finally, the third piece of uncertainty relates to the cost of the intrusive investigation should this be required.

A system that is based on the Monte Carlo cost forecasting system is ideally suited to deal with these kind of uncertainties. The outcome of the Monte Carlo cost forecasting system is typically a series of potential project costs together with the probability that each of these costs will not be exceeded. Thus, employing a combination of a rigorous EIA scoping study and the use of the Monte Carlo cost forecasting methodology are essential tools in the effective cost management of environmental impact assessments.

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