As I look back on my life, I always hated the ‘first day.’ I find the ‘first day’ of almost anything to be exhausting. First day on the job, first day of school, first day of college, first day of the year, you get the point. I don’t know if it is just me but my face always seems to hurt after the first day at a new job because I feel like I have been smiling way more than normal. You know how it is, trying to make a good first impression.

When starting a new job, I am sure most people are familiar with their very first task on their very first day; completing and returning the ‘packet’ to the HR representative. That packet contains documents for health insurance, tax deductions, and various other necessities and benefits employees will have during their employment. All that paperwork….Exhausting!!

After completing the HR packet, it is time to get the tools required to do the job. For me, as it is for many people, that tool is a laptop. Along with the laptop, I need software, an email account, a network account, an MSDN subscription, a phone, a phone number which requires an account with a carrier, permission to network shares, a building access card, and other various tools that usually fall under the responsibility of IT.

My age or, even better stated, my extensive experience has allowed me to see good and bad examples of how IT equipment is given to a new employee.

  • On your first day, your boss will start walking you to different people from IT saying things like, “Hey Bob, this is Marcel. He is starting today, can you get him a phone?” Next he will take you to Mike, “Hey Mike, this is Marcel. He is starting today, can you set him up with an email account and give him network access? Also, can you call Jay and have Jay get him a building access card?” Finally, your boss takes you to his desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a laptop. He says “This used to be Dave’s laptop; the guy you are replacing. I don’t know what’s on it so feel free to re-image the laptop.”
  • This ad-hock style of asset management is a good example of poor asset management. Poor asset management results in lost IT assets.

The Ponemon Institute released a study (conducted independently and sponsored by Intel) of The Billion Dollar Lost Laptop Problem.

Participating organizations reported that in a 12-month period 86,455 laptops were lost or otherwise went missing. That added up to 263 laptops per organization on average.

To avoid losing IT Assets, create processes to track assets when they are assigned and reassigned to employees throughout the asset lifecycle. On-boarding user processes will help you track an asset so that the asset can be recovered when the user leaves your organization or if the user is transferred within your organization.

To build an efficient On-Boarding process, list all IT assets an employee will need based on their position.

Define a process that assigns IT assets to employees. Assets assigned should be based on the employee’s position.

After you define the process to on-board the new employee, automate everything by using a business process manager (BPM). Automation will help eliminate human error and it will enforce your on-boarding process by not allowing any deviation.

Automated processes should have the ability to check for ‘available’ IT assets, such as available laptops and software licenses. If a process determines an asset is not available, it should automatically generate a request to your business partners so that a PO can be generated and the asset can be ordered. At a minimum, a request should be sent via email to the appropriate person in charge of completing the task.

Summary

When you setup automated processes to map users to the assets they use, you decrease the potential of losing the asset. When users move within a company or when users leave a company, automated processes need to be in place to recover IT assets, to remove permissions to sensitive online data, and to cancel accounts and subscriptions. I will discuss Off-Boarding users in Part 3 of this series.

This article was originally published on marcelshaw.com