How does your organization handle asset tracking?

[Circaflex]

I am curious to see some of the responses to this thread. At my current workplace, I am shocked at the way asset tracking is handled and I am wondering if this is similar anywhere else and I am just thinking outside of the box.

 

Currently, the IT team using Landesk to track their assets. The IT team will run a query to see who the last user was logged in, and assume that user is the sole "owner" of the unit. I see so many things that can go wrong, and they have with this method. I will list them out.

 

-If a unit is shared across multiple employees, you never actually can identify the main user

-Assets are not "checked out" to employees, again, status is determined by the last user login when the Landesk query is run

-For instance, and this happened to me while I was a contractor for them, I was logged into one of the mobile stations and on their query I was determined to be the "owner" of said unit. I did not officially work for them, yet they wanted to provide me with an upgraded unit because I was last logged in

-If a staff member from another department happened to login to the device before the query was run, that staff member was now the owner when queried whether they belong to the department or not.

-If a unit is not used often, which is the case where I work, it is essentially off the grid and not accounted for (sadly this has happened). This has resulted in computers, 8 years+ old still being used and not upgraded

 

 

Now I might be crazy, but the other organizations I worked out did one of the following:

 

-Employees were given a unit, desktop or mobile, with an asset tag that was tied to their employment. If they moved, the unit was moved with them, or the unit was decommissioned and a new asset tag was assigned to them in the new location.

Or

-Floor plans was mapped out, units were mapped to the floor plans and asset tags were assigned to the units based on the floor plan. This provided IT with an ongoing summary of units in a department at all times.

 

I am curious what your organization does. I am dumbfounded by the lack of organization within my current employer and am quickly finding out, the IT team is full of imbeciles and the procedures are severely lacking from the top down. For example, today we received an email, less than 24 hours, that Windows 10 would be deployed on roughly 20 computers. Ever single company I have worked for had a plan put in place with proper communication, at worst or in emergency situations there was a 48 hour notice minimum for something major like this. I am struggling to understand how these guys get anything accomplished.

[techbeck]

Asset tracking is joke at my place.  We have a system where we log assets in to and assign to a user. But rarely do I remember, or anyone else remembers, to reassign the asset to another employee.  So we have assets still assigned to someone that has been gone for a year or so.  There is no link to AD or CM to update the assets based on the last user/dept logged on either.  So any changes/edits to the asset are manual.  And normally if a device has multiple users, we just assign it to the dept or the manager of the dept.   We recently started to use dual factor authentication at work now which prevents many users from logging in to any PC they want to.  So that helps on knowing what area the system is in and what users access the device. 

[dipsylalapo Supervisor]

Asset management, I feel is one of those things that as long as it can do some of the basics, no one really cares. 

[techbeck]

1 minute ago, dipsylalapo said:

Asset management, I feel is one of those things that as long as it can do some of the basics, no one really cares. 

Unless you do one thing wrong and then the manager at my work who handles the system has a meeting to discuss how you screwed up.