Large corporations routinely misplace hundreds of PCs, misjudge the amount of fees they should be paying for software licenses and contract main- tenance, and allocate IT resources inefficiently. A study by software and services supplier Micropath Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., found that the average corporation has 22 percent more PCs than the records show. Agencies and corporations pay the cost. According to two respected IT research and consulting organizations, International Data Corp. and the Gartner Group, large organizations can shave between 5 percent and 35 percent from their annual IT expenses by improving asset management. It's not just a question of money.
Unrecorded assets are difficult to manage.
Fragmented IT inventories were one of the first problems agencies encountered when they began to tackle year 2000 remediation. For example, the Air Force's first effort to assess the extent of its millennium problems overlooked 5,000 computer systems, says Robert J. Lieberman, assistant inspector general for the Defense Department. Without a clear picture of the hardware, software and communications links on which DoD relies, the department's managers were handicapped in planning and budgeting for the necessary testing and remediation work. Lieberman said one positive outcome of the Y2K experience has been the first good inventory of DoD systems ever compiled. But hard- ly a day goes by without a change in that inventory, as new software and computers are acquired and old ones decommissioned or updated.