It's an old addage that you can't manage what you can't measure.  But can you manage what you can't see?

 

The University of North Carolina'sIT were perplexed when they could "see" a Novell server on their network but just couldn't for their lives figure out where it was and touch it physically.  They lived with this uncertain state of affairs for some time when, finally fed up, decided to get serious.  Like rescuers trying to find a lost cave explorer by following a descent rope, the IT staffers let their fingers do the walking along the network cable to find the little lost server.  Which was...

 

Buried alive.  Trapped in drywall by some construction workers.  Four years ago.  And the little guy never missed a packet in all that time.

 

So what's the asset management moral here?  Honestly, I'm hard pressed to name an easy technology or best practice fix that would have reliably prevented this particular mishap.  And I rather doubt it's a problem most asset managers lie awake worrying about (unless they're also going through a home remodel).  It's just a great story.  (When I first heard about this from my IAITAM SAM instructor I thought it might be apocryphal, but hey, it's on the web in a legit IT journal so it must be true...)

 

OK, so to give this story a little professional relevance, it does illustrate is that auto-discovery by itself is a great "asset management" tool, but not a complete solution.  Among many other things from cost to contract to lifecycle management, an asset management process and toolset should have a repeatable, reliable way of keeping track of assets' physical locations.  One efficient tool for this is a mobile application and device with a barcode reader that can talk directly to the asset application, and tied to both regular inventory checks as well as move/add/change processes.  MobileReach, a BMC partner, was able to help eBay acheive 95%+ inventory accuracy with such a solution.  As more RFID solutions come on the market (and costs come down), this holds promise, too.