Building and maintaining an accurate and up-to-date global inventory of
hardware, software, and telecommunications assets deployed throughout an
organization is described. A global inventory warehouse (GIW) receives an
identification and physical location of these assets from multiple source
systems. Some of these source systems contain information pertaining to
the assets that has been manually entered into the source system by a
human administrator. Other source systems, meanwhile, contain information
that has been automatically collected by the source systems without human
intervention. The GIW receives this information from the source systems
and stores it within a GIW database. The GIW database may thus contain a
global inventory of all or nearly all of the hardware, software, and
telecommunications assets distributed throughout the organization. This
database may also contain an identification of physical locations within
the organization of all or substantially all of these assets.