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About
Watch Your Assets continued page 2
10/5/2005
Single-System
Asset Management
Most large schools already use some sort of software for managing large depreciable assets such as building and air conditioning systems. What they don’t know is that the software they’re already relying on may be able to find gold in campus IT assets, as well. One company offering products that can be used for managing every type of asset on campus, from buildings to software license agreements and PDAs, is Sunflower Systems (www.sunflowersystems.com). Sunflower’s customer list includes a number of large government clients (including areas of the Departments of Justice and Education), and the University of California system.
Stanford University (CA), for one, implemented Sunflower 18 months ago, as part of a much larger campus overhaul of its financial management systems. The school is using the inventory asset management module (Sunflower Assets 3.7.1), and agreement assets module, among others, and is in the process of implementing the IT management module. Departments are required to use the capital equipment modules, but use of the IT module is discretionary.
According to Ivonne Bachar, director of the Property Management office at Stanford, her office’s objective is to offer the university a single repository of data that can be used for capital and sponsor-owned, as well as IT assets. Sunflower was appealing, she says, partly because it can interface with an Oracle (www.oracle.com) back-end database and financials. Stanford tracks IT assets and other items, she explains, including site licenses and software versions loaded on machines. The tracking software is also used for more complex monitoring: tracking the stewardship, accountability, and transaction history of sponsor-owned, donated, loaned, and leased equipment. It also helps with replacement planning and with the disposition of assets, she adds. Tracking how IT assets are disposed of when they are deemed ready for retirement can be hugely complex. Disposing of potentially hazardous equipment, following regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, confidentiality concerns, and security issues all come into play.
Managing AV Assets
In the corporate world, IT asset management software is traditionally used for tracking hardware and software. But colleges and universities may also want to track other high-tech assets—especially audiovisual equipment and other digital accessories—simply because there’s so much of it to manage. Additionally, with some software packages, monitoring and remote control of media and instructional technology equipment can be accomplished in real time. That enables you to extend central help desk capabilities to classrooms through the same asset management system.
According to the University of Minnesota’s Classroom Technical Services department manager and engineer, Jim Gregory, there’s a long list of assets for which an IT or AV department might be responsible.
