Six Ways ETM Makes Managing Enterprise Technology NOT Stink

To write The Next CIO, I interviewed 12 seasoned CIOs to understand the foundational challenges faced by current CIOs and the solutions needed for the next generation of CIOs to address these challenges.

The overwhelming response identified the primary challenge as the multitude of manual processes IT deploys to run the business. CIOs need better solutions to facilitate a transition toward more autonomous IT operations.

This foundational challenge manifests in two main areas:

1. Rapid Automation of IT Processes: CIOs need to automate IT processes, such as employee off-boarding and IT audit readiness, within days to weeks, not months or years. Current approaches involve time-consuming and expensive projects to build custom solutions, draining limited IT resources.
2. Accurate Technology Data: These processes need to be informed by accurate technology data. As a former Cisco CIO shared, “Automating with garbage data just makes the garbage go faster.” The more technology a company manages, the harder it is to maintain an accurate and comprehensive digital twin of these assets when manual processes are involved.

Unfortunately, the tools and approaches available to current CIOs for managing enterprise technology are inadequate, leading to six foundational reasons why managing enterprise technology (for lack of a better term) stinks for modern IT organizations handling thousands to hundreds of thousands of technology assets.

Enter Enterprise Technology Management (ETM), which I propose in The Next CIO. Let me review use cases where an ETM application can help make managing technology assets less burdensome.

Lack of Accurate Asset Visibility and Inventory Controls

Many IT departments lack accurate visibility into their entire technology asset landscape, making it difficult to answer basic questions such as: What assets do we have? Who has them? Where are they right now?

You might think that a company manufacturing technology would have an easier time managing their technology assets, but this is not the case.

For example, a Fortune 25 manufacturer found that traditional IT Asset Management tools did not provide adequate asset visibility. They attempted to use a CMDB but discovered it was too expensive and time-consuming to keep configured correctly. Additionally, they couldn’t trust their CMDB because it was found to be inaccurate. This is not surprising since some reports state that CMDBs are only about 60% accurate on average, especially when manual processes are involved.

Next, this Fortune 25 company considered developing an in-house solution. However, they quickly realized that this approach would require months, if not years, to implement. Moreover, they’d face the ongoing resource drain of supporting, updating, and upgrading the custom solution.

Fortunately, this company discovered Enterprise Technology Management (ETM) and now has ETM in-house providing accurate visibility and helping to manage almost a million technology assets.

Asset Protection

With poor visibility, ensuring the protection of assets such as laptops becomes challenging since you can’t secure what you can’t see. For instance, an MDM tool might report that a laptop is secure, while the endpoint protection software could miss an update, leaving that same laptop vulnerable.

As another example, a healthcare company with over $5 billion in revenue had a Glassdoor page where former employees shared a tip: "Want a free tablet to take home from work? Work here and just take one, it's too easy!" And it turned out that’s exactly what was happening. The tablets were being used to digitize health records, and thousands of American healthcare patient records were walking off with ex-employees.

Fortunately, this healthcare company no longer faces this issue, as they now have ETM in-house, providing accurate visibility into their hardware technology and automation to ensure they recover technology from offboarded employees.

Preparing for IT Audits

When you have manual processes, you can't guarantee an accurate audit trail, accurate asset data, or strict adherence to your policies, making it expensive to manually prepare for an IT audit. Of course, it’s even more expensive if you fail the audit.

A city government, Pleasanton, has an IT team of 10 supporting almost 2,000 active users and over 3,000 devices. The IT team tracked assets through spreadsheets and exported data from siloed management tools, taking about 30 hours a week. Additionally, every time an audit was announced, the IT director would spend an entire weekend exporting technology asset data from various tools into spreadsheets to prepare for the Monday morning audit meeting. This included quarterly internal audits and yearly external audits to show adherence to NIST, along with compliance with the American Water Infrastructure Act (AWIA) and Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) standards for law enforcement.

However, the City of Pleasanton no longer struggles with preparing for IT audits since implementing ETM in-house. With just a few clicks, they can provide auditors with accurate technology asset data.

Meeting Compliance Requirements

All compliance frameworks require inventory controls, and meeting these frameworks is impossible without a record of managed technology. Without accurate inventory controls, organizations are constantly at risk of non-compliance.

A leading accounting software company needed help passing ISO 27001 compliance audits, where they were asked questions about how they managed their assets, which assets were assigned to which users at any given time, and what notifications and actions were taken when a user left. They couldn’t answer these questions.

Now, with ETM in-house, they can.

Wasted Budget Spend

The fifth reason why managing enterprise technology stinks is the inefficient spending of limited IT budgets. Manual processes and inevitable rework are more expensive than letting computers complete a bulk of the tasks.

A company in the transportation industry had a 50% recovery rate of laptops from offboarded employees, costing them an additional $600K/year to replace laptops for new employees. However, after deploying an ETM application, their recovery rate shot up to 98%, and they hadn’t spent a dime replacing ex-employee laptops in months.

Poor Experiences

The sixth reason why managing enterprise technology stinks is spending time performing manual tasks diminishes IT employee experiences, limiting bandwidth to work on more strategic projects.

In addition, incomplete data can cripple the ability for a help desk to deliver exceptional experiences. For example, if a help desk receives a call about a laptop issue and the support person lacks immediate access to detailed data on that device, they’ll likely have to say, "I'll need to do some research and get back to you." This leads to a poor employee experience compared to having immediate access to the necessary data for quick resolution and ticket closure.

An ETM application addresses this challenge by enabling more complete and accurate data on a company’s entire technology landscape, helping to improve employee experiences significantly.

Anything resonate?

Do any of these use cases resonate with you? If so, contact me and I can set up an ETM demo for you to explore if an ETM application might be the right application to help you automate your IT processes run on accurate data.

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