Reduction in Time to Perform IT Infrastructure Audits

Physical inventories of IT infrastructure assets were time consuming and required extensive data quality checks and validation. Enhancements to existing tools and process improvements were identified. 

Business Challenge 

In support of an ITSM-based Asset Management process, Falconwood was tasked with performing extensive physical audits of approximately 140,000 IT infrastructure assets throughout the Navy’s facilities in the continental United States. The audits required collecting data about each IT infrastructure asset that was found, as well as identifying which assets were expected but not found. The collected data was compared against the system of record to identify discrepancies and detailed reports of the discrepancies were generated. 

After the team performed the initial audit, a data analyst/reconciler would review the data for completeness: data captured for found assets was corrected and assets expected but not found were properly investigated and documented. This process often required  the data analyst and the auditors to piece together information based on the auditor’s recollection of what they observed. When auditing a data center, a data analyst/reconciler would spend a significant amount of time researching data completeness issues rather than contributing to the audit.  Falconwood’s Solution 

We recognized that the audits were time intensive and often required dialog between the auditors and the reconciler, which resulted in corrections to the collected data and sometimes re-visiting the location audited. We reviewed the asset audit process and tooling and identified that changes to the data collection and completeness review steps could be further automated and performed while the auditors were on-site. These changes would reduce the dialog between the auditor and reconciler after the fact, reduce potential re-visit to research/validate data concerns, and increase the accuracy of the data collected. Tool enhancements were implemented to allow for the on-site auditor to perform data quality assurance (QA)/completeness checks, such as missing model data, invalid asset tags, and incorrect classification data. Self-service reconciliation to identify any expected not found assets (ENFs) and the inclusion of comments/feedback for those assets was also implemented. These tool enhancements were automated using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in Microsoft Access. The audit process was also modified to require the auditors to perform data QA/completeness checks, data reconciliation, and validation of ENFs before leaving a location (typically the room they were auditing). 

Results 

The VBA automation enabled the data analyst to review the data in less time, but also allowed for these data checks to be performed by the auditor while in front of the assets they just audited. By having the auditor perform this, any issues were identified and corrected while on-site instead of relying on their recollection after the fact and before submitting their data to the data analyst. The data submitted to the data analyst to review was cleaner and more complete which further reduced the amount of time to complete the analysis of the data and produce the audit results. 

These tool enhancements and process improvements resulted in a 60% reduction in the amount of time to complete an IT infrastructure asset audit.