Marine Corps IT hardware: a method for categorizing and determining technology refreshment cycles

Abstract

Management of information technology (IT) assets within an enterprise is necessary to control organizational costs and ensure that the necessary business requirements are supported. For over 10 years, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) was charged with this task in Navy and Marine Corps IT systems. With the expiration of the NMCI contract, the Marine Corps is now managing its own IT assets. To understand the scope of IT assets to enable better management, this research explores items accounted for within the master data repository, which is aiding in the migration of legacy logistics systems to GCSS-MC. These items and their associated costs are divided into categories to provide a baseline view of Marine Corps IT hardware assets. An equivalent annual cost is applied to assets to suggest a refreshment cycle for laptops, desktops, and servers. This demonstrates a method that can provide IT managers with a means of determining when an asset should be refreshed.