Only superheroes accepted in this team
By: Alejandro Lavie
Tags: It Asset Management, Information Technology, Software Asset, Leadership, Asset Optimization

IT Asset Managers have a new bar to clear.

When Liz Reich realized that in order to conquer IT Asset Management in a large organization like MasterCard she needed to take a different approach, there was only one decision to make: how to call this group of federated experts around the world and across different areas of the business. Well, there were many decisions, but that’s a one we liked to showcase here.

Liz is the VP of The Global League of IT Asset Managers, which applies a new federated concept to an old practice, making it more effective and likely to succeed in certain organizations.

We talked to Liz for our series of podcasts — Rockin’IT, where we interview IT leaders to share their success, ideas and passions to inspire us all. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Anchor.

Her opinion is that the organization needs to federate the management of IT assets so you can have active material control while embracing the value of different specialty areas that own, know and buy technology. Instead of trying to centralize ITAM power and control everything from within four walls, she enables the business and technology owners with best practices like data capture, lifecycle management, training and assessment opportunities so that they can answer typical questions of their assets with certainty and agility.

“Don’t ask a lawyer a question if you don’t want a legal answer” she says — “Bring in the experts on the areas that they run. When we federate asset management we bring that business knowledge to work, plan and allocate resources based on vetted and reviewed data that is curated by the owners”

A point that we found very interesting on how this came to be, is the influence that Liz’s background had on her current role. She spent a long time at Monsanto leading their IT sourcing department and that background has helped a lot in evolving her work, where she advocates for a close relationship between sourcing and asset management throughout the whole lifecycle.

“If you are buying a car, the time to get a deal on oil changes is when you are buying the car, not later.. so, a better maintenance program, special support and improved lifecycle for technology need to be negotiated at the time of sourcing, baked into the contract and as part of the negotiation strategy”

On complexity and maturity

In this interview, Liz also talks about the challenge of collating data from Hardware and Software from within your organization, with other not-so-classic things like facilities, IP addresses, HVAC controls, and other assets that become part of the business delivery that are not typically tracked in traditional IT Asset Management but offer better ways to manage as a whole to present better decision making opportunities.

But we believe that this approach is not for everyone. Not all organiations are this complex, or have gotten to this level of maturity for whatever reason. Liz argues that — “Many companies build their programs based on what they are selling, what they offer today to the market, but when they grow more complex across regions and functions, Spreadsheets and one person-shop don’t work. No longer it’s easy to crowdsource solutions and you need to have repositories, knowledge locations and informed people across the organization”. At that point, you need people, processes and buy in from management and Liz recommends that in order to gain this, you need the right tools to bridge the gap in situations like a software audit.

On partnerships

MasterCard is a user of Flexera, a global leader in IT asset management and a sponsor of our podcast. We asked her about the value that it provides for her program:

“After a highly regimented sourcing process, Mastercard decided to partner with Flexera to be able to achieve opportunities to meet audit requirements. That was instrumental, by and far.”. She also highlights what seems to be a mantra for her on efficiency and value quantification:

“now that we have the tool to remediate this audit, what else can we do with it?. Flexera solved a huge problem for me, but the potential was much bigger than that problem, so we looked at what we were trying to solve”

MasterCard and the League could answer questions about their assets, like

Do I know how old it is?

Can I prove I own it?

Do I know the products that this asset supports?

Can I tie this asset to a contract

How are we consuming it

And this is crucial and powerful information in the right communities, which she recognizes quickly as a driver for a federated model: “If I have a tool that can centralize this information in one place, but only have a handful of people that can use this information, we have an inefficient way to distribute knowledge. Creating a federated system allows people to self-serve and be effective at leveraging the aggregate data”

“Everybody in the role of technology has a role to play in Asset Management […] SAM is both strategic and tactical”

Liz chose Tom Petty as her rock band for the episode we recorded.

On SaaS

“SaaS is a brilliant idea. It allowed people a lot of freedom to acquire and develop services” — but Liz asks herself — “what have we given up with this freedom?, because I still need to track it, and without control you are moving the soap around the tub. We have a fiduciary responsibility to take a stance on our responsibility to track these investments.”

This is a great way to communicate the problem that many face with the rise in unsanctioned (shadow) SaaS and Cloud spend. In one hand flexibility and agility are important for innovation, but there are countless terror stories of organizations that have no visibility on their spend, and risk, given the lack of governance for these architectures.

On leadership

Liz is a recognized Leader. She’s been a champion of creating communities. If you want to contribute value to the organization, you got to know the cost (material, human, financial) before you talk about a value statement when you are looking to make decisions and build cases. It’s all about good quality data.

We closed the interview asking Liz about advice for young women and girls that want to get into IT and be successful. “You need to ask the difficult questions. Nobody should be told ‘no’ just because of your nature, gender or how you ask questions”.

Liz is a rockstar of the IT world, and we enjoyed this time a lot. We have three asks of you: