Taking asset management beyond IT

hello and welcome to the service management show from the team here at epicos I'm Gary bar I'm a service management practice lead here at OS and in this episode we're going to be talking all about taking assets Asset Management Beyond it I'm pleased to say I'm joined by a guest as always and I'll let Kevin introduce himself hey thanks Gary well uh I'm Kevin Patterson currently I'm the principal consultant at a Dr esm Solutions where you I help organizations make the leap from I service management into the realm of Enterprise service management happy to join you today right uh so this month we're going to as I said talk about asset management in general and specifically we're going to talk about assets Beyond it that's like the big topic but U first of all Kevin uh for our viewers and listeners would you like to sort of um just sort of describe what an assay is basically yeah so you know there's there's a you know a lot of confusion sometimes on what an asset could be is it something I can touch is it something that could be virtual is it um you know is it something of value and really to me assets can be anything they can be anything that we find useful to drive a business process or to drive value for an organization so when I work with an organization whether it's the IT department or it's you know a business team like marketing or HR facilities I kind of take them through a journey of an asset being anything that we use to interact with throughout the day whether it's physical or virtual to solve our business challenges and that seems to be an easy way that everybody can understand what an asset really is and um I know assets can be like classified that's different types of things we sometimes hear things like iot and OT and it what's what do what do these things really mean to the Layman yeah so it's interesting right so I've been doing you know I've been in ic for over 25 years right and on Journey you we talked about Assets in the beginning days as being you know computers right we we thought of assets being oh I've got laptops I've got servers I've got printers these are assets and and honestly those are all great example of it assets right but then over the years things changed a bit right we started hearing about you know iot over the last 18 10 or 15 years where it's the you know internet of things well what what are what are these assets and this really can be anything right so it's funny I've got a scanner in my in my home that is scanning my environment and I think it picks up about five or six compute devices traditional devices like we talk about assets but on top of that I got 16 other devices that are more iot devices things like my Alexa virtual assistant I got a few of those running about I've got a saltwater aquarium that uh is on the network and the lighting again I consider that iot right so there's so many things that we have in in our modern lives that are really considered kind of um you know iot right internet of things and that's um I think I read a a study uh last year talking about the average United States home has something like 17 connected devices and that's just kind of the average right I mean yeah I found more than that in mine I'm sure you probably have more than that in yours you were to do a scan and find out what it is yeah I've got 39 it's crazy isn't how how fast I bet if you didn't scan and I asked you that question you pra say I'd got 15 or 16 you just don't realize how prevalent it is that these things are are scattered about your home and then I'm sure we'll talk about this later but think about that in the Enterprise context of a of an office space just how many things are you know not just deployed by the organization but you know from a BYOD perspective how many things have made their way into the uh the office Network and then I just can imagine what the it security team feels like you know every day they come in the office and see these new things popping up that's if they can find them so it's uh yeah yeah there's definitely a lot um things about today and then we have you know the the OT the operational technology right now I'm I'm lucky in my background and back in 2005 2008 I worked in manufacturing and we had lots of OT devices back then right these are things like devices that are you know driving our manufacturing cells things like you know our our tooling that was on a network that we used to collaborate and things like these you know that was really purpose build equipment to drive a business process right or to to provide value and you you're seeing more and more you know verticals like manufacturing and Healthcare and others that have a a pleora of these OT or operation technology assets that aren't quite computers themselves but do have a chip inside and are on the network more than likely and um you are part of delivering value to the customers so all three of these things are important right so nowadays when we're talking about Asset Management we really have to you know talk about them all holistically and not just focused on one particular type because they're all interdependent interconnected these days yeah absolutely I I I remember last early this year actually I went to um the OTC event in Houston which is to do with the energy sector which is this massive event with like 300 exhibitors and stuff but it blew me away I hadn't considered just how many things like monitoring devices and network connected things there are involved in in everything from you know kind of solar Generations through to even like good oldfashioned Drilling in the ground and sucking oil out of the sea you know there's like hundreds of these sort of monitors and all these other really smart Nets of analyzing all the equipment under the sea and stuff it's incredible um so yeah absolutely um it's uh technology is is is is pretty much everywhere and on that point I thought we would we spoke previously and I thought would be good option to share some unusual stories about some of the unusual assets we've have come across in our in our kind of careers so far um and what sort of challenges we had with those and and how we overcome it and would you like to startop so I can I can go back to the way back time so I I got into it back in operations in in in the year 2000 right so kind of ran the operations path for nearly 10 years before I jumped in and started doing um service management work for itm vendors but during my operations time I saw all kinds of unique and interesting things right so I worked for a um a company out of Sarasota Florida we we did um Discovery and management of things like uh old pbxs now I'm not talking like the new contact cers I'm talking you know Meridian option 11s these big honking things in closets right so yeah we were discovering you know these types of things and Discovery was a loose term right because these weren't on the network right we were actually you know you know using our technology to figure out what was at the other end of contact closure connections right so you the logic Anda in that was pretty complex to understand what type of device these things were and also too you had other types of ports you plug into like rs232 those old n pin DBS so you we were constantly finding ways to scan and discover what device was on the other side when we plugged the you know things into those Terminals and for Discovery so and then on the other side of Discovery you've got well how do you manage these things so we also were managing things like oh if there's certain alarms we would actually take those contact closures translate it and pass that on to a centralized server somewhere before the cloud that would uh you know be used by text to not just know what the equipment was but to figure out what the alarm would be so that's kind of one interesting thing I saw way back in my my career when I started working with with assets but then I got a really interesting project uh with the Department of Defense we started taking that same technology and um using it to discover and monitor military equipment which you know this is back in the early 2000s but most of their equipment was from like the 1970s and 80s so you can imagine there's not a lot of well you think of the military modern you think these big you F35 fighter jets that there's Marvel technology but the the truth is behind the scenes these things operate and the teams operate on Old equipment older than I was right but we had to still discover and manage that so yeah I can't talk too deep in the use cases but the the ability to to use non-traditional ways to figure out what equipment was and then bring that back so that the teams didn't just know what they had but they understood how it was configured and most importantly once they got it discovered they could start mathing it out and figure out you know if this one component were to fail is is there a redundancy if there's not what's the impact to our operation right and so you kind of saw early on that that taking the data and discovering was only step one steps two three and four are about you know making sense of that data and kind of applying it and understanding that the configuration and how it impacts the whole environment and that leads me to where I'm at today right so the tooling has gotten so good the things we have um to discover and understand has come a long way in these 20 years right so now it's not just about Discovery and finding out you know what's uh what's on the network or what might be the device configuration but it's what is that device talking to you know what what communication paths are happening so that's where a lot of I people are today I think is they're kind of focused on well I know we have I just need to know these interdependencies I want to understand what we're talking to which in in my opinion gets us out of the the realm of asset management into a more deeper configuration management and dependency mapping but it's it's what they're talking about right and then you know recently say the last four or five years the use cases I I've been getting involved in are really you Enterprise service management Asset Management these are things that you know outside of it for our business teams like HR facilities you know uh marketing and and finance you know they're starting to realize that they need to start tracking things and it's difficult too because I mean you and I have kind of lived in these tools for a long time but you know the older days the tooling was very inflexible you had a a data model and thou shalt not deviate from this data model right you really couldn't there was no flexibility and and with with Enterprise assets you we don't track things the same way there's other attributes we need that are critical that might not be on that list and we need that flexibility to configure so so lastly it's it's been a lot of those type of use cases my my favorite one today I'm working with a um a research uh University over on the west coast of the US um that's their um particle accelerator lab right and they're tracking you know all the equipment for all these experiments things that I wouldn't think are assets like glass and lenses well those are assets because these things can cost tens of thousands of dollars and they're high Precision the way they the the the different curvatures and the the thickness and I learned so much about that just helping them design and build the system that to me it's one of my most favorite use cases now because you know I couldn't discover anything on that it was all you know getting spreadsheets and files and then kind of making sense of it loading it but that's probably been the most interesting use case in fact I I J with some of my alasan friends it's like we always talked about working in High Velocity it doesn't get more High Velocity than a particle accelerator you know shoting things across and that's been um that's been a treat to be honest working with those guys yeah those are my favorite sort of ones that I've had as well they're kind of you know you get the it ones and they're kind of Fairly they're never straightforward but they're fairly routine and then you get the kind of real Edge case ones like that and I think I shared you before about the um the the the most infamous one or the one that I talk about quite a lot is in the UK on the kind of Motorway or freeway Network we have traffic cameras CU we have terrible traffic and like every sort of half a mile or so or you know in every Junction you'll see these big gray cameras that kind of monitor the traffic and they can use that to control like the speeds and things like that and I actually work for the company that provides all of those for the whole UK Network and uh when I went went to the meeting with them uh to you know they want you know they wanted to set up a service desk and they wanted to have the asset management cdb with it the glog D literally came in with good oldfashioned blueprints on on great big sheets of like A2 paper and like you know proper blue colored schematics and put them on the table and then he had like boxes full of parts and he was getting all these parts out and going look this is everything I want to be out to track I was like wow okay let's let's start kind of you know drawing up what this is going to look like and and start thinking about how we can start to prototype a an asset model for that but they did it and it's still used today and and it and like the things you said you know it goes down to the lens or the circuit board that's in the camera and they know which batch that came from when they ordered it from that manufacturer so that they know if they have a problem with maybe one or two cameras that have the same circuit board that they then can just get a replacement for all the cameras just go around and and service them all so it was interesting it's amazing what the uses are for that data right so you brought up a great use case there about you know oh if I we notice certain patterns and and things failing we can kind of track it back to a batch and we know where those batches are deployed too it's it's those types of things that we really need to do a better job educating some of the non-it folks on because once they get that realization you know they'll come around to putting more effort in into the into their practice and process use for asset I I think back to my time in the field I um you know I was lucky back in those days we were all in the office right there was no remote so you kind of knew what was going on but I remember there was an Old Dell oplex model that U the capacitors were popping all the time right and I knew about that because I had seven die in a week but had I been in a larger organization with tens of thousands of machines instead of only a few hundred it might have taken me weeks or months to realize that pattern but had I had a good asset tool connected to my service management solution I could have spotted that problem much earlier and so the data really is key to getting that in so it's interesting to kind of hear you you're talking about this use case serving outside it for the same type of value and I I really I love those stories it really it's it's great to hear I guess uh to sort of um bring the conversation round the thing to that we ought to really talk about really is is what is the best place to start if you're going to be starting even with a you know an it B solution or even something like we just said some of these examples we just used so what sort of things do we need to sort of consider like give me that example the guy comes in the room with all the blueprints and the boxes of nuts and bolts where where where would you start Kevin with that conversation yeah it varies right depending on on the the the person I'm talking to right so if they've got minimal um you know asset management experience at least from the tooling standpoint or from Best Practices standpoint I I kind of start before we get to the blueprints and and really get into awareness and I try to bring it back to you know what are the use cases we're trying to solve it's not just about putting these things into a database or into a spread sheet and and just you being able to pull them up and say here's what I have so I tend to start with you know understanding the use case and even before that you know getting into awareness right you know and talking about the benefits advantage of the things we could do kind of talking about the art of the possible with them it's like hey you're coming in thinking this but let's just think you know going forward we can do these other things too and and one Pitfall I see around this and I was kind of falling into this myself and I've seen other practitioners do it as well is we use a little too much technical jargon when we're talking to some of these business teams right so you know I I might know iil I might know you know cdb asset configuration management CI you and I could probably through acronyms all day long but if we use this yeah if you use net too much we're going to lose the audience right so or lose the person we're talking to so as part of the awareness i t not to use the jargon I I'll break it down into more simple terms like you know that they understanding or even try to learn their terms and say you know here's what we're doing and I I joke right now I'm I'm a lasting consultant and I find if I use the three letters AQL more than three times in 30 minutes I I'm I'm talking wrong right so I need to I I need to kind of walk that back and talk more in more basic terms so yeah for me it's it's awareness before we dig into those blueprints right because chances are what they're going to bring me might not be everything they need in fact I know it's not I'm going to come up with some things in the design that they don't have readily available they might have to go into retrieve right and you know when you're dealing with the Enterprise service management side of the house it's not always going to come from a discovery tool I mean if it's it sure there's a plethora of tools out there stcm you know and you know in2 and in Jan and we're we're going to hug into that we're going to bring it all in but on esm it's much more going to be in my experience either spreadsheets worse off it going be in people's heads or in your example I printed documents it's a printed blueprint coming out of a filing cabinet from 1997 and we so that that's kind of where where I start is kind of you know understanding what we're trying to accomplish and in a perfect world we haven't picked a tool yet right but but nowadays it seems like there's already Tooling in place and you know we're just going to kind of shoot horn your esm use cases into your it service management platform yeah I wish it wasn't so wish we were able to kind of pick the right platform for the the right problem but you know today I think it's really about getting value out of the platform of the organization Chosen and then making that use case work and kind of doing workarounds of know workarounds and workarounds to to make it a good customer experience for them so that's kind of where I've been starting I I yeah 100% agree I I um I had a a weird conversation a couple years ago with a very well-known Motor Racing brand where they kind of said to me oh we want to track all of our devices on on all the cars and my first question was why and the second question was what are you going to use that data for and it turns out what they were really doing was that a lot of the devices on there only had a fixed life lifespan you know they would only last like a th000 laps or whatever it was and so what they were really looking to track was the lifecycle those devices so when you then approach it from the other side it's like okay then so what you really want to be able to know is when