Hi Norm
I agree - RFID or similar technology is the only viable way to track assets leaving the building. RFID scans at all exits can detect assets leaving the building, and if staff and visitor security badges are also RFID enabled, you will know who they left with. The capabilities and storage capacity of both active and passive RFID tags are really quite large and the number of possible uses is growing. Not just Walmart using it for all items entering their store delivery entrances for stock control, but tracking people, like patients in hospitals (where did that alzheimer's case wander off to?), stopping visitors entering secure areas, etc. Then you can do asset inventories by using hand-held scanners to capture asset details from RFID tags, or set rooms up with built-in RFID scanners to do automatic inventories. The only problem you have to overcome is tags becoming 'separated' from the assets. I'm not saying that SMS etc. are useless - they're just not much good for tracking missing assets. Others have pointed out the good points, like helping to manage software and config changes. Systems like SMS are ideal candidates for federated CMDB data - you don't want all that volatile data duplicated in Remedy, but you want to be able to drill-down into SMS from your CMDB when you need those extra details. As far as 'closing the loop' for change requests is concerned, again I don't think this is SMS's strong point. For that there are agent-based solutions that will monitor changes being made in real-time on key assets, file systems, databases, etc. and correlate them to authorized changes. Take a look at Active Reasoning's Policy Management tools which can integrate into ARS if this sort of thing interest you. With systems like this you can review what changes really happened, as opposed to what was authorized in the Change Request, or automatically create tickets when unauthorized access or changes are detected. Regards David Sanders Remedy Solution Architect Enterprise Service Suite @ Work ========================== ARS List Award Winner 2005 Best 3rd party Remedy Application See the <http://www.westoverconsulting.co.uk/downloads/ESS_Concepts_Guide.pdf> ESS Concepts Guide tel +44 1494 468980 mobile +44 7710 377761 email [EMAIL PROTECTED] web http://www.westoverconsulting.co.uk <http://www.westoverconsulting.co.uk/> _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kaiser Norm E CIV USAF 96 CS/SCCE Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 6:50 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Real-World Value of SMS & CMDB Hi everyone: I wanted to discuss the practicality issues of using SMS to populate the CMDB. I understand all (or virtually all) of the theory, but now I want to discuss the real-world practicality of it. By my estimation, the only real-world value I see in using SMS to populate the CMDB is that it saves someone from having to pound the keyboard to get system information into it. That's it. I've heard some folks talk about using SMS to identify deltas within the hardware inventory. That is, on Day 1, Dell Workstation 1 was discovered by SMS. On Day 9, Dell Workstation 1 is missing. That's a delta. An inventory manager can then be notified of that delta so that he can go figure out if Dell Workstation 1 got up and "walked away." But the way SMS is configured at most large sites, this would not work. In some configurations, items do not get removed from the SMS database until their machine account in the Active Directory is removed AND the machine fails to respond to polls for X amount of time. This does the enterprise no good in preventing, say, theft, as a thief does not request that the computer's machine account be removed from the Active Directory before he steals it! Theft prevention and loss prevention are two of the justifications in the total cost of ownership calculation, according to ITIL. But SMS alone won't get you there. You need something like RFID to truly identify instances of missing hardware. So what does SMS get you other than not having to pound a keyboard? Thoughts? Norm __20060125_______________________This posting was submitted with HTML in it___ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org ARSlist:"Where the Answers Are"
