Savings due to the uptake of ITIL best practices need not be confined to experienced practitioners or experts with established metrics. After, money saved is not itself concerned with how you measure it.
As an asset manager, I am building on the successes of others before me and trying to avoid some of the pitfalls they found. Lifecycle Management is a practice or discipline in which we seek proficiency. Obviously, the advantage is that well-managed assets produce value more efficiently than poorly-managed assets.
So we have a number of issues facing us when we look at monitors for PCs. In my inventory, I have a profusion of (no kidding) fifty different models of monitor, reaching back about fifteen years. I used my mad SQL skillz to group a bunch of this stuff into a graph of monitor counts by year of purchase (from top to bottom) and size in inches (from left to right). This showed me a graph going from small old monitors in the top left to large new ones in the bottom right. The graph was bowed a bit up and right in the middle, as we (it appears) had purchased larger and larger monitors for several years running, then fairly standardized on 22 and 24 inch monitors for the past four years or so.
You would think that would be good, and that the old monitors had been chased out of inventory, but this graph was the currently existing monitors, not the record of purchases. I had not even attempted to see what monitors had been purchased but were no longer on hand. Right away, I noticed that there was a huge knot of two large purchases of 17 and 19 inch monitors about 7 and 5 years ago, respectively, and they were still in service, but probably not for long. One of the key drivers of lifecycle management is increasing failure rates as assets age, and these looked like a hard rain was heading my way.
Just the same, I did not want to line up for an unusually large monitor purchase. How was that supposed to work as an introduction to the benefits of ITIL for the people who would review (and presumably approve) the request? “We’re using a great new set of processes to save money–here’s a request for more monitors than you’ve ever seen because of what happened before you or I worked here.” This sounded like failure with a cherry on top. I could justify it with all sorts of numbers, but I figured that if I can;t make sense in one sentence then it’s not going to win, and if that sentence is a dire warning about the risks of not modernizing, I would run my own risk of going to that well too may times, and for trivial things. Face it, if you want to scare the money people, the prospect of a flaming monitor is not much to work with. Put out the fire and get a new one up here, pronto. Oh, and you’re fired.
The common lifecycle for workstations is three years, and monitors four. I already had 24 inch monitors going out of industry standard lifecycle, and I still had a nasty mess of 17, 19 and 22 inch monitors deployed and aging well beyond that. I figured that the worst problem I had was an expected failure spike in 17s and 19s, which practically nobody wanted anyway. There was a huge mass of old small monitors which I could not wipe out with a single purchase unless I put in the dreaded record-breaking purchase request. So I needed a couple of strategies to work together.
Obviously, I was going to have to purchase a bunch of monitors to replace the oldest ones. Now perhaps there is a 26 inch monitor that we should all just be dying to have, but how much is enough? Besides which, I already had ten models of 24 inch monitor, with most of them split between three models and some outliers. Desks aren’t getting any bigger, laptops aren’t, and a 24 inch monitor will be acceptable for a decade unless the whole technology changes underneath it, to some coiled e-ink magic paper display. I should be able to standardize on one model to simplify things as long as I track the fiscal year of purchase for each monitor.
Now presumably, standardization carries some benefits, or it wouldn’t be so popular. We could pretend to quantize the benefits, but I have always hated imaginary statistics. Once you let an estimate out of the bag, it always seems to come back as a quoted figure, usually with your boss’ signature underneath it. This is how words get put in your mouth. So The task here is to describe qualitatively the advantage of
