Data is amazing. It can revolutionise the way a business operates, provide insights in to how a company actually works and, best of all, it’s practically free!
Every business has data everywhere but unless it’s actively used it’s worthless. Once you start to massage your raw data it can magically become information which is one of the most important assets a business can have.
Let’s take a simple example: an IT asset list. That document which your business absolutely definitely has and is absolutely, definitiely, 100% accurate.
Rubbish. Its just data. Its something someone has bunged in to a spreadsheet and will update once they’ve finished the rest of that ticket. If you’re lucky its a part of a more major suite of tools you use for managing your IT infrastructure. But even then its rubbish. It needs to be turned in to information.
So how do you do this? Well think about the other data you have. If you have AD you’ve got a list of joined Computer objects. Similarly with AAD you’ll have a list of enrolled/joined devices. Then theres your AV, every machine you have will be listed in there. Your Dell portal has a list of machines alongside their warranty expiry dates, and perhaps you push a backup agent on to all your machines and they can be monitored from the console.
Now grab each of these lists and compare them against each other - you now have information and you’ll probably be surprised at what you see. From this you might find that:
- All the machines you bought in March aren’t in your Asset list (when you had that intern in)
- All the Dev guys have removed AV from their machines
- Dave in Accounts hasn’t returned his old machine yet but it still seems to be in use
- You’ve got backup licenses assigned to 50 devices that were retired ages ago
This is your golden list. This is the accurate representation of your estate. And this is what you need to fix.
Doing this gives you a monthly task - compile, compare, fix. It’ll pinpoint processes that are broken or missing, and allow you to accurately report on machine usage and forecast lifecycles.
Data on its own is useless. Data turned in to information is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. You should probably use it.