Frequenty Asked Questions

Q: What is IT Asset Management (ITAM)?
A: ITAM, a multi-layered discipline, is the fusion of business and IT strategies that underlie every IT decision. It incorporates cradle to grave tracking, analysis, and management of IT assets, including physical, historical, configuration, and financial information. Data is integrated from sources such as purchasing, leasing, maintenance, licensing, inventory, help desk, network, change, systems, and application management tools. Competitive and effective organizations depend on ITAM to guide them in managing the lifecycle of each asset in order to reap maximum value from their IT investments.

Q: What's the difference between IT asset management and asset tracking?
A: Asset tracking is a small but important piece of asset management. It provides baseline information to an organization of what is owned, where the IT assets are, and what changes are occurring. The details are kept in a central repository or database.

Q: What's the difference between TekMethods and other service providers?
A: Please see "Benefits"

Q: What value does TekMethods add to an outsourcer organization?
A: Most IT outsourcers focus on procurement, help desk, break/fix, install-move-add-change, or configuration support and prefer to stay away from the complexities of an ITAM project. They don't have the resources to devote to understanding the expertise required to plan, customize, implement, provide quality control procedures, map and develop interfaces to scores of the customer's existing databases. Yet they may charge customers based on the number of supported devices, are measured against Service Level Agreements (SLA's) for the timeliness and quality of the work they perform, and must be prepared to swap inventory on short notice. TekMethods provides the answers outsourcers need to give their customers the very best service possible and to enhance the ability of end users in making knowledge-based decisions.

Q: What's the advantage of hiring TekMethods over in-sourcing?
A: To answer this question, you must first analyze the capacity of your staff and leadership to produce the project - is the depth of experienced staff lacking or are more individuals required to make up the project team than are available? Next, consider the timeline - is it so restrictive that critical staff will be redirected away from mandated functions? How will this affect the budget (think: cost overruns)? TekMethods, a Project-Based company, has experience that is both wide and deep. We can help develop cost models to demonstrate return on investment. ITAM is our sole focus and therefore the planning will go smoother, the implementation will be less prone to error, and the project is more likely to be completed accurately and on-time. Many in-house projects are doomed to failure or wither on the vine because there is no one dedicated to it or because responsibility is relegated to someone who is either over-burdened already or is too far down the food chain to understand the business implications.