The Term Nobody Coined

I want to start with a question that turned out to be a great deal more slippery than it looks.

Who invented the term “IT asset management (opens in new tab)”?

When I first asked it I assumed it would take about four minutes to answer, because look at the phrase. Precise, corporate, faintly bureaucratic, the sort of thing that gets printed on a lanyard. It has an acronym, ITAM, which means at some point enough people were saying it that somebody got tired of saying the whole thing. There are certifications in it, and conferences, and textbooks, and standards (opens in new tab), and an entire global profession of people who put it on their business cards and their LinkedIn and, presumably, occasionally have to explain it at parties.

Things like that have an origin. A person, a date. Don’t they?

So I went looking. And what I found was so much weirder than I expected that I have not really stopped thinking about it since.

First stop, the dictionary problem

The obvious move is to look up the definition and see who’s credited. So I did. And here’s the first strange thing.

Everyone agrees. I mean everyone. Every vendor and analyst and glossary page you can find says almost exactly the same sentence. Something like: a set of business practices combining financial, inventory, and contractual functions to manage the lifecycle of IT assets. Word for word, near enough, across a dozen different sites that have never once cited each other.

Now, when a definition is that identical across that many sources, your brain goes, ah, they’re all copying from one original. There’s a source upstream somewhere, and if I can find it I’ve found my inventor.

Except none of them say what the source is. They all quote it like scripture and not one of them tells you who wrote it down first, which for a profession whose entire stated purpose is keeping accurate records of where things came from and when you got them is, I think we can agree, quite funny.

So the glossaries are useless. Fine. On to the institutions, because surely one of these big organisations is the parent.

There are three good suspects: a framework, a research firm, and an association that would very much like you to think it was them. And I’ll tell you now, because it’s the part that got me: each one looks like the answer right up until you check the dates. And then it doesn’t.

Suspect one. The very British framework.

The first suspect is ITIL (opens in new tab). The IT Infrastructure Library. And honestly, when I found it I thought, oh good, that was quick.

Because the modern write-ups all say ITIL is a framework for IT service management and IT asset management. There they are, the two acronyms, ITSM and ITAM, sitting next to each other like they grew up together. And ITIL has a gorgeous origin story behind it. British government, the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (opens in new tab), who built it in the eighties to sort out government IT. Version one came out in 1989.

So there’s your date, and a British government agency to go with it, and the term apparently sitting right inside the thing from the very beginning. I genuinely thought, that’s it, question answered, I’ll be home for tea, and then I made the mistake of looking at what ITIL actually published, and when.

Version one, the 1989 one, was this enormous thing, about thirty volumes, and it was all about service support and service delivery and something called configuration management (opens in new tab), which is its own database of all your bits and pieces, the CMDB. And that’s the point. It managed the configuration of services. Nowhere in those thirty volumes is there a section called IT asset management. Not a chapter, not a passing mention.

So when does it actually show up? You have to go quite a long way down the publication history. Software Asset Management (opens in new tab) gets its own ITIL book in 2003. And asset and service lifecycle stuff only really comes together at ITIL version three, which is 2007.

Fourteen years, that is. The framework that supposedly named this discipline in 1989 didn’t publish a single thing called asset management until 2003, longer than some of the companies using the term had been in business.

So what’s going on with all those modern pages saying ITIL covers ITAM? They’re just true of ITIL now. Today. And everybody’s read that backwards onto 1989, which is such a human thing to do, and also just wrong. ITIL handed the field an enormous amount of useful machinery, the process structure and the lifecycle thinking and that configuration database everyone still leans on, and none of it was the name. By the time ITIL wrote the words down, the words were already out there in the wild, being used, with no help from anyone in Whitehall.

Which is the bit that hooked me, actually. Because if the term was already out there before ITIL picked it up, then where did ITIL pick it up from? Somebody was already saying it.

Suspect two. The Americans who sold everyone the reason.

Second suspect, and this is the one everybody reaches for, usually with total confidence. Gartner (opens in new tab). “Oh, it’ll be Gartner. Gartner names everything.”

And to be fair to them, they’ve got a much better case than that makes it sound.

Gartner is genuinely credited with popularising total cost of ownership (opens in new tab) for IT. From about 1987. And TCO is a lovely thing, the observation that a computer costs you way more to own than it cost you to buy, once you add up all the support and the running and the rest of it over its whole life. And that idea is the engine of this entire field. The moment a company believes that, it suddenly has a brilliant reason to track and manage and tidy up everything it owns.

Which is a reason, though. Not a name. That’s the bit I kept tripping over, and I know how it sounds, like the sort of distinction you invent to win an argument, except that a name is the only thing I’m actually looking for here.

So I went looking for Gartner actually saying the words “IT asset management”. And every single document I could get to is 2011 or later. And in all of them Gartner is using the term like it’s old furniture, something you mature and benchmark against rather than something you’d ever claim to have introduced. And nowhere, nowhere, is there a “we coined this”.

So Gartner ends up in the same position as ITIL, just from the other direction. One of them gave the field its bones, the other gave it a reason to get out of bed, and as far as anyone can show, neither was there first. Nobody named anything.

And this is where the famous argument, the ITIL-versus-Gartner thing that people love to have, just falls apart in your hands. They’re not two people fighting over a crown. They’re two people who turned up to a party that was already happening, both using a word somebody else had already started using. The question stops being which of them coined it. The question becomes, hang on, then who did?

Suspect three. The kitchen table.

Third suspect. And this is the one with the lovely story, which is precisely the reason I got suspicious of it.

1998. A group of software and hardware asset managers start meeting up. Around a kitchen table, by their own account, a small one. They’re talking about how there ought to be a proper organisation for people who do this job. And out of that comes IAITAM (opens in new tab), the International Association of IT Asset Managers, officially incorporated in 2002, founded by Barbara Rembiesa. They go on to write the canonical definition, the one all those glossaries are copying without ever saying so, and to build the certifications and the letters you can put after your name, the whole apparatus of a profession.

It’s a proper founding story. Kitchen table and all. And I really wanted it to be the answer, but read it again, slowly, because it knocks its own claim over.

You cannot get a group of IT asset managers round a table in 1998 to talk about the future of IT asset management unless IT asset managers already exist. And already call themselves that. And already do a thing that already has that name. What they were short of was a club.

Which means the suspect whose entire identity is built on this phrase turns out to be the best evidence that the phrase is older than they are. They didn’t invent the term, they adopted it, and by the time they got round to adopting it the thing had been answering to that name for years.

Three suspects, three near misses. Every one of them turned up to find the word already lying there, and not one can tell you who left it.

The fingerprint

At this point the sensible thing is to shrug and say, right, it’s early nineties, desktop computers everywhere, software licensing turning into a nightmare, somebody started saying it, who knows. And that’s a reasonable guess. But a guess isn’t a finding, and I found one thing that does better than a guess. It doesn’t crack it open, but it does something I love.

There’s a moment, years later, where an analyst firm describes IT asset management, almost in passing, as a discipline that’s “coming back into prominence after existing for many years as something of a dormant, niche discipline.”

Sit with that. Coming back. Dormant. For many years.

You cannot come back from being dormant if you were never alive. A brand new term can’t go dormant, it hasn’t been around long enough to fall asleep. So the term was alive and working and then went quiet, all of that before the late 2000s, and it only woke back up because budgets got tight and software audits got scary and ITIL version three made lifecycle thinking fashionable again.

That’s the closest thing to a fingerprint the open record gives you. The thing was already old enough to have had a nap, which tells you roughly when it must have been born without telling you anything at all about the birth.

Why this never resolves, and why I think that’s the good bit

Now, I could dress this up, but you’d see through it.

I cannot give you a name, or a date, or a paper, or the room it was first said out loud in. And I don’t think that’s because I didn’t look hard enough. I think there was never anything there to find, which turns out to be the more interesting answer.

Some terms get coined. Somebody stands up at a conference and christens the thing, and somebody writes it down, and there it is. Total cost of ownership is nearly like that. The idea of counting what a thing costs you over its whole life is ancient, but the version we mean, the IT one, you can pin to Gartner and to 1987, and even to the analyst who built it.

But some terms don’t get coined at all. They build up. Like a desire path, those worn lines across grass where everyone’s clearly been walking, except nobody ever decided that’s where the path goes. The grass just gave up. And IT asset management looks just like that. It’s two pieces that were both already busy doing their jobs. “Asset management (opens in new tab)” came out of finance, decades old. “IT” was the prefix the late twentieth century stuck on the front of absolutely everything. Put them next to each other and you haven’t really invented anything, you’ve just described what was on the desk in front of you. And probably loads of people described it at roughly the same moment, in different offices, in different countries, within a couple of years of each other, none of them thinking they were naming anything at all.

That’s why the glossaries can define it so confidently and tell you nothing about its birth. There wasn’t a birth to write down. And it’s why ITIL and Gartner and the kitchen table each look like the parent for about thirty seconds and then turn out to be the adoptive family. Three foster homes for a foundling that turned up on all of their doorsteps already answering to its name.

And there’s one more thing, which I keep turning over. There is, almost certainly, a first written use sitting in an early Gartner note behind a paywall, or in trade press from the mid-nineties that nobody ever digitised, or in some internal memo at a company that has since been bought twice and forgotten. You just can’t reach it, because at the time it didn’t occur to anyone that the writing-down was the part worth keeping.

We assume the important things announce themselves. That a discipline shows up with a founder and a flag. Mostly they don’t. Mostly they sort of slide into existence so gradually that by the time you notice it’s got a name, the naming’s already ancient and nobody can remember doing it.

Somebody said it first. We will probably never know who.

Which is either deeply annoying or rather wonderful, and most days I think it’s the second one.