Dams often cost billions. That’s why they are owned and managed as assets.
If you are not familiar with asset management, think of it as how you’d manage something quite expensive that you’d own for a long period of time, such as your home.
Asset Management
If you currently own a house, you probably know how much it costs to own it and live in it on a monthly and yearly basis. You know everything about mortgage payments, taxes, electricity, gas, insurance. You may also have a clear accounting practice about other expenses like lawn mowing, house & pool cleaning, and more.
Furthermore, you have a list of potential home improvement projects spanning the next 5 years, with rough estimates for the longer term ones, and tangible quotations from contractors for the imminent ones. In addition to improvements, you kept track of when certain heavy maintenance works were done and the expected time for a next round, such as your roof done 5 years ago that is guaranteed for 20 years. In addition, you’re probably aware of the current market value of your house.
That’s asset management applied to residential real estate.
The Importance of Asset Management
It is practiced by most owners because of the importance of the investment and the duration of the ownership. If you were lucky enough to have your house paid and maintained by your fairy godmother, I doubt that you’d know or even care about all these housing asset management details above.
No Fairy Godmother
Your corporate IT team is not a fairy godmother. The best tracking they can do on information systems assets is to sum up a list of projects or budgets and make the false assumption that it can be mapped to assets. The business applications and their data are the object of little effort from an asset management point of view.
The True Causes
The reason is simple: corporate IT manages first and foremost yearly budgets on technology. That’s where the focus is. It easily fills the day, leading to the year, and five to 10 years later hundreds of millions or billions are spent whilst there is no asset management in place.
Learn the true reasons behind information systems asset management currently falling in a no-responsibility void: https://rmbastien.com/seminar-12-truths-about-corporate-it-lp/
P.S. By the way, this is not another IT problem for them to solve.