Asset management, in its traditional form (tagging and tracking), is a very valuable tool for a company to understand its true value and where that value lies.  Asset management, in terms of Asset Context Discovery © (ACD), delivers the traditional returns (identification, location and evaluation of the physical item) in addition to determination of the service value associated with the asset by understanding direct relationships and interfaces.  ACD, a concept developed by AGINT to holistically account for an asset, considers the asset from two distinctly different but equally relevant perspectives; the asset instance (that is, the asset as an independent item), and the asset in terms of the organisational context.  It aims to implement traditional asset management and then identify all of the direct interfaces associated with that instance (and can be expanded to include indirect interfaces, thereby giving an end-to-end picture of the asset chain, allowing single points of failure to be identified and risks mitigated).

ACD takes a view of the asset from several different points and then puts in place a whole-of-organisation consideration of the asset.  However, the ACD concept is flexible enough to be able to be broken into separate compartments so that an organisation can choose which compartment it needs assistance with, and implement that particular compartment only.