Patricia Adams is a research director in Gartner Research. Working within the IT operations area, she has been the lead analyst on all aspects of IT asset management, both software and hardware, from tools through to process design and best practices. Her research area also gives her insight into synergistic areas within IT operations management, such as ITIL and other IT service management disciplines that overlap with ITAM. Actively tracking and managing software and hardware inventory often overlaps with configuration management databases (CMDB), so Ms. Adams co-covers the extensive CMDB and IT service dependency mapping tools and marketplace.