Collecting Essential Application Inventory
When talking about application inventory, most people think about automated software inventory tools etc. Other than the application names and versions there is some essential application knowledge to collect from the organization. IT departments have hard time to collect this necessary information since its not inventoried. This data will not come from a system inventory but from the application owners or business units who own the applications. This is more a manual process and the data to collect can be listed as follows:
- Business Division for the application
- Business Role using the application
- How many users are using the application
- OS / Patch level for each application
- Identifying subject matter experts (narrow down users)
- Contacts numbers
- Other applications installed (conflicts / dependencies)
- Geography used in
- Division used in
- User Roles running this application
There is an application knowledge sheet i use when gathering this information which you can find attached.