How to Advocate for Your Data
All organizations don’t treat their IT asset data with the same level of enthusiasm. This tends to correlate with the maturity of the IT asset management (ITAM) team.
Mature organizations are excited about the multitude of ways they can help their organizations with the intelligence they have on their technology assets. Here are a few examples:
- Understanding how technology is actually being used so they can buy the right amount of licenses
- Reporting on application versions to identify devices that need to be updated
- Determining where there are overlapping technologies used in the organization and where some applications and costs can be eliminated
- Finding applications that are end-of-life or soon to be deprecated
- Identifying applications in use that haven’t been vetted by security
- Quickly reporting on effective license position
Less mature organizations understand the potential value of their IT asset database but find getting other departments to leverage their data repository is like pulling teeth.
The least mature organizations are typically using an ITAM tool for one use case. These organizations don’t have a good owner of the tool (it’s often someone’s part-time job) and resulting data. The potential for using this data set never sees the light of day.
“Data and analytics leaders who share data externally generate three times more measurable economic benefit than those who do not.”
data sharing is a key digital transformation capability by Gartner®
6 ways to advocate for your data
So, how should less mature organizations advocate for their data? Here are a few tips:
- Communicate the quality of your data. How is the data collected, how often, how is it normalized, and enriched? How will you validate the data accuracy?
- Understand the process others are using for capturing data today. It is possible your colleagues are ignoring you because they think they already have the answers? Have a sit down and get a detailed understanding of how they capture the IT data to do their jobs. It’s likely they are doing a lot of manual work or have big gaps in their data that you could help them with.
- Use tools for sharing data already familiar to the organization. Many of our customers feed their IT asset data into their analytics tool of choice (PowerBI, Tableau, etc.) where most in the organization already have access. The other benefit of this approach is users can join technology data with other datasets to solve additional problems (e.g. reporting on sustainability initiatives, etc.).
- Leverage AI. With generative AI technologies, there are now more ways to further democratize data insights. Now, your colleagues can simply ask your dataset questions like, “Are there any inactive computers in our inventory?” Or, “How many new servers have been discovered in the last 90 days compared to the prior 90 days?”
- Make data actionable. Provide the data in a format that can be used by your stakeholders. For instance, it would be best to provide data via API if your stakeholder is planning to use this information in automating processes.
- Leverage forums owned by your leadership. Your leadership likely has an all-hands meeting, newsletter, or some other kind of forum where you can communicate the rich dataset your organization has, its accuracy and some examples of how it could be leveraged by various stakeholders. Involve your leadership to understand what they think are the most impactful use cases you should pursue with others in the organization.