Diary of a IT Technical manager (with a plan) - Month 3

One thing I’ve noticed when trying to plan ahead with our infrastructure is there are so many things out there for us to do.

If like me you are easily distracted you start reading about the NIMM, then you get an email from say eHealth insider about software asset management, so you click the links and read about that, then on the website there is a link to information about the CUI program so you start investigating that, then Safeboot comes along and that becomes your new priority.

There’s no real all encompassing roadmap to guide us on how all these technologies fit together or guidance on the best way to go about it.

I still see my organisation in the “where we are” phase. Establishing what we do have before we work out what we need.

One of the main problems many Trusts have had over the years is a lack of a decent computer audit and actually a lot of things revolve around what equipment you currently have in place.

We need to know specifications of the PCs for when new software comes along, we need to know make, model & serial numbers for Server Maintenance or DR contracts, we need to know exactly how many PCs/Servers we have to ensure we have enough software licences, we need to know whether our PCs can handle the next version of MS Office.

If someone had asked me how many PCs we had in our Hospital two weeks ago I would have guessed about 200 less than we actually do have, imagine 200 PCs in a room, that’s a hell of a lot. I asked some of my collegues the same question and answers ranged from 500 to many to 500 too few.

So having a decent audit tools is one of the foundation blocks of our infrastructure plan, so many things spawn from it.

We've just implemented a Software/Hardware Audit solution from Bytes (for free) and it has been a real eye opener.

Each time we implement something new I’ll make another article explaining the timescales & costs around it and what’s involved from our point of view.

I’ll start with our experience of the Software Asset Management Tool which I’ll publish soon under the heading Operation Infrastructure.