The anatomy of IT equipment loss

Today, companies and organizations have IT equipment everywhere, a large part of which is in mobile use. There's a lot of money in them. They change owners and places, they need to be stored, serviced and maintained, they have problems and they need to be disposed of safely. You can also get a good price for them on the secondary market. Life cycle management of IT equipment is not an easy task. You could say that the bigger the organization, the more locations and the more shared devices, the more challenging it is to use traditional models to operate at a level that satisfies all parties. However, traditional life cycle management models are repeated, and in the end we are disappointed when we did not reach the goals.

What does disappearing mean?

The loss of IT equipment usually means that there are equipment in the equipment or asset register, of which it is not known where they are and who or who is using them. Another typical option is that the ordered number of devices cannot be found in the device register or anywhere in general, no matter how the inventory is made.

Some are already lost when they are acquired

Organizations usually know quite well what they have ordered, but the control fails at the point when you should find out what has been received for sure and where the devices have gone and whether all the devices on the invoices have been delivered. Many parties are often involved in the purchase of a device: the customer, the device supplier, the wholesaler, the financier, the pre-installer of the device and the user. All these parties pass information related to procurement and delivery to each other, which is often processed manually without copying the data and ensuring the quality of the data.

Corrupted device registry

In many organizations, the biggest responsibility for maintaining the device register is ultimately borne by local support and helpers, who reactively resolve support and service requests. In practice, support organizations update the device register manually when creating a device card and processing requests. There is no way to see whether the data has been entered correctly, and there is no evidence of deterioration of the device data. The end result is a device registry that no one can trust, and devices just start to "disappear". Nothing alarms when the device is placed on the shelf to wait for the next user.

The removal stage is leaking

If there are many devices in the device register that cannot be found anywhere, the reason may be that the decommissioning process does not work and the device register does not stay up-to-date in this regard. Decommissioned devices often end up gathering dust on the corner of a shelf instead of ending up properly recycled or reused. It is also often not noticed in time that the device is not being used anymore. Six months from now, there will no longer be reliable information available about where to hunt for the device.

Peripherals below the radar

Peripherals are almost always excluded from active lifecycle management. Peripherals are acquired and delivered, but after that most of them remain under the radar. Peripherals can hold a large fortune. Peripheral devices connected to workstations in the device register are often connected to the workstation's device card as additional information. If the workstation is broken or otherwise replaced, the additional information will not be updated in the replacement situation and the information about the peripheral device will be lost.

Endless swamp

In large organizations, many parties are always involved in the lifecycle management of IT equipment. Some of these parties are external suppliers and some are internal units. Each party takes care of its own plot, trying to minimize the tasks belonging to its own plot or to maximize its own income and margin. No one has real overall responsibility for managing the assets and life cycle of IT equipment other than maybe on paper. When there is no overall responsibility, the focus is on one-off equipment registry renovation operations and manual inventories, making instructions and technical sub-optimizations without understanding their effects on the entire life cycle and its costs. As a result, equipment continues to disappear and money is wasted, and the situation is not managed at a level that satisfies all parties.