Maturity model for Service Asset Lifecycle

Your organization can reach the next step of service asset lifecycle maturity through best practices adoption and native BMC product process integration. The following maturity model helps you optimize rollout of Service Asset Lifecycle in phases.

Phase 1 — Understanding your assets

Focus on the location, identity, quantity, and current status of your assets. Understand how that static depiction of your assets can change by the request and provisioning of assets. Look at what IT has, what your customers want, and how IT provides assets. In this phase, implement discovery, request fulfillment, and order management. The goals of this phase are:

• Autodiscover deployed assets and software
• Automate asset deployment and usage monitoring
• Support reconciliation and normalization
• Automate the supplier order fulfillment process
• Increase the quantity of asset requests that follow automated standards

To support this phase, BMC recommends that you use the following products:

• BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (BMC Atrium Discovery)
• BMC Service Request Management
• BMC Asset Management
• BMC BladeLogic Client Automation

Phase 2 — Asset tracking and reporting

Focus on supporting and managing your assets. The goals of this phase are:

• Track assets from initial deployment to retirement
• Report on asset support costs
• Track assets to support services
• Perform comprehensive inventory tracking
• Use analytics for reporting

To support this phase, BMC recommends that you use the following products:

• BMC Dashboards for BSM
• BMC Analytics for BSM

Phase 3 — Maintaining standards

As assets move through their lifecycle, they are subject to changes. These changes include support cost changes, physical changes, and the attribute and relationship changes associated with the asset and the role it plays in the service lifecycle. Both strong change management practices and structured configuration management practices support the change management activities for an asset. In this phase, you implement asset configuration management and software license management. The goals of this phase are:

• Increase visibility into the assets that compose a business and technical service
• Reduce errors in the configuration of assets
• Increase compliance with regulations and standards

To support this phase, BMC recommends that you use the following products:

• BMC Asset Management
• BMC Change Management
• BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (BMC Atrium CMDB)

Phase 4 — Optimizing service asset alignment

This phase covers highly mature asset management practices. You implement financial management and supplier management. The goals of this phase are:

• Decrease total cost of ownership of assets
• Increase compliance and audit ability of software and hardware assets
• Provide the business with financial data
• Increase effectiveness of IT spend with suppliers
• Optimize assets to support IT services
• Decrease the effort to manage IT suppliers and vendors

To support this phase, BMC recommends that you use the following products:

• BMC Asset Management
• BMC IT Business Management Suite