[Discuss] [OT] Asset Management

[Kyle Leslie]

As I know many of you manage a lot of the equipment and things that go
through your office I was wondering if anyone could assist.

Currently at my company we do an awful job of managing everything from
software to machines we hand out to users.  I suggested to one of my
managers that we should really review our Asset management, well they
decided to play a sick joke and put me in charge of it.  Does anyone know
of any resources that I could leverage to at least get started on this.
Books or anything at all would be useful.

I know the first problem always starts with getting the people to do the
right thing but we are a small team and I am sure bad habits can be
changed.

As an example of a bad process (I think), we currently name our end-user
machines after the person receiving it. Ie. BOS-KLESLIE, we run in to
trouble with this in many areas but its just something I think is not a
good way of doing things, for various reasons. 1 Major one is If we have to
deploy a new machine to them (many/most remotely) we have to name the
second machine BOS-KLESLIE2 then retrieve the old machine remove it from
the domain and rename the newly deployed.  Well, when I came to this
company we have machine names like BOS-KLESLIE5.  Quite frustrating when
you don't know if 1-5 have returned.

Any suggestions at all would be useful.  We currently have software to do
this (Track-IT) but if people have good suggestions I am open to those as
well.

TIA.

Kyle