Managing assets doesn’t have to be as daunting as it sounds. Thanks to enterprise asset management software, it’s become easier to manage assets digitally. IT asset management (ITAM) ensures an organization follows all methods to maintain and manage its assets.

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What This Article Covers:

• ITAM Process
• Stages of an IT Asset Life Cycle
• Importance of ITAM
• ITAM Software
• ITAM vs. ITSM
• Next Steps

ITAM involves tracking and making strategic decisions regarding IT assets using financial, contractual and inventory data. The key goal is ensuring optimum IT resource utilization.

By lowering the total number of assets in use and increasing the life of those assets, ITAM also aids in cost optimization by preventing expensive upgrades. Understanding the total cost of ownership and figuring out how to use the assets most are crucial components of ITAM.

ITAM Process

These are the steps in the IT asset management process:

Identification

The first step in IT asset management is to create a detailed inventory of all IT assets. This ensures they’re optimized for higher productivity and makes it easy to discover different assets.

Tracking

This requires an IT asset management application or system to monitor IT assets routinely. For each asset, gather financial (costs of the assets), legal (warranties, licenses, and service-level agreements) and inventory information (location and condition of physical assets).

Maintenance

Depending on where they’re in their life cycles, you should maintain your IT assets accordingly. Keep track of any IT asset maintenance done as part of the ITAM process so you can use the information to evaluate the performance later.

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IT Asset Life Cycle Stages

Each IT asset has a shelf life. IT asset management aims to optimize productivity by controlling an asset’s life cycle. The stages of an IT asset’s life span may vary depending on the company.

• Planning: Planning includes deciding on asset requirements, their purpose and acquisition. While planning to acquire assets, organizations also consider competitive alternatives like the total cost of ownership.
• Procurement: Purchasing, licensing, building and leasing are a few ways to acquire assets.
• Deployment: Depending on the asset, deployment will require technical support for installation and integration.
• Maintenance: Schedule preventive maintenance to maximize asset usage and value after deployment. Increase their life spans, save money on repairs and protect employees from hazards.
• Retirement: Retire an asset when its value depreciates and maintenance becomes costly. It’s a sign that the asset has fulfilled its life span. As part of asset retirement, you must update outdated asset information, cancel support and license agreements, and switch to new assets.

Importance

According to Deloitte’s IT Asset Management (ITAM) – Global Survey 2022, 84% of respondents stated they lack an effective ITAM initiative.

We’ve learned about what ITAM is and how it works, but why do organizations need ITAM after all? Here is a list of reasons underlying the importance of ITAM.

Create a Single Source of Truth

When you’re tracking assets in multiple locations, managing them is challenging. Disarray and inaccuracy can take hold, resulting in inefficiency and bad business choices. Asset tracking is simpler and more effective with a single truth source. You can view all of the assets that need to be replaced, improved or optimized for maximum efficiency in one location.

Optimize Asset Use

Teams may reduce waste and increase utilization because asset management keeps information current. By assisting in preventing pointless purchases and lowering licensing and support expenses, it helps to save money. In addition to reducing risks, increased control also ensures adherence to security and legal regulations.

Support and Enable Teams

Supporting IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) procedures like change, incident and problem management depend on IT asset management. The IT department makes it possible for the entire company to be more creative and to provide value more quickly.

Teams can respond quickly and anticipate the effects of changes when they have access to the proper data. Your organization obtains a competitive edge and may offer value more rapidly by democratizing access to insights. Every firm that wants to stay up with the pace of contemporary innovation must become more strategic about managing, tracking and regulating IT data.

Ensure Software Licensing Compliance

Software suppliers frequently demand that companies that license third-party software submit to software audits to ensure that the companies comply with the license’s terms and conditions.

The agreements carry stiff penalties for breach. Thus, organizations employ IT asset management software to continuously check that all software is compliant with all applicable license agreements and is installed on all computers connected to their networks.

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ITAM Software

Growing IT assets make it difficult to manage them with manual, paper-based or spreadsheet-based methods. IT asset management software is a centralized tool for tracking and managing asset life spans.

Most IT asset management software solutions have features that provide enterprises more control over their IT environment and ease asset tracking.

Features

Automated Detection: Most IT asset management programs identify every piece of hardware and software installed on a company’s computer network.
IT asset management software manages licenses for IT assets.

License Management: Licenses are cross-referenced to the pertinent inventory data to notify the organization if it’s over-licensed and obtaining software it won’t ever use or is under-licensed and in danger of violating a license agreement. Track the expiration dates of license agreements and inform the organization accordingly.

Version and Patch Management: To keep a company’s network of computers safe, current and functional, asset management software keeps track of the distribution of new software patches and versions.

Request Management: Some ITAM software enables businesses to design asset request workflows and track all requests for IT assets. They handle the acquisition and deployment process while assessing license needs for these assets.

Inventory Management: ITAM tools track all company resources. Asset information, including name, license agreement type and version, is kept in the inventory.

Configuration Management Database: The configuration management database is a centralized database that houses data on the IT assets and connections between a company’s assets.

Fixed Asset Management: Data management for fixed assets is handled by a separate repository in most ITAM solutions. Hardware is the principal category of fixed assets.

Digital Asset Management: ITAM software’s digital asset management function includes managing digital rights and rich media (e.g., multimedia content like videos, music and photos).

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Selecting ITAM or Asset Management Software

Selecting the right ITAM solution can take time and effort. If you’re confused, you can take pointers from the factors mentioned below.

Purpose: The reason your organization requires ITAM software and the goals you want to achieve by switching to digital asset management should be crystal clear. Management should schedule meetings with all pertinent departments to solicit their input.

Cost: The next stage is to compare pricing with your budget once you have found software packages that suit your goals and expectations.

Technical Support: You should pick a vendor that provides technical assistance when required. You can obtain this assistance through a self-service platform, online user community, in-app or web chat with a chatbot, phone help, or social media chat with a customer service representative.

Reviews and Ratings: Reading reviews of a software program from current and former customers on independent websites (such as app stores and software rating organizations) can assist you in making the right decision.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) vs. IT Service Management (ITSM)

Despite having considerable overlap, ITAM and IT service management (ITSM) are different IT management disciplines.

IT service management, as opposed to IT asset management, focuses on managing and delivering IT services.

It has various parts, such as organizing and putting into place IT services as well as keeping track of them and auditing them to ensure they’re operating effectively. IT services include support from the help desk and service desk and change management procedures, which effectively handle IT infrastructure changes.

IT service management aims to offer dependable, high-quality IT services that satisfy the demands of the company and its end users, including clients, staff members, and business partners. The goal of ITSM is to raise service levels and user satisfaction.

Services and assets often differ from one another. A managed desktop service is distinct from a desktop PC.

In the past, different organizations have usually developed the best practice recommendations for ITAM and ITSM (until the ITIL’s most recent version, ITIL 4, offered ITAM guidance to service management professionals).

Organizations that have implemented both have maintained them as two distinct ecosystems, one centered on assets and one centered on services, to foster cooperation and collaboration where the two disciplines cross.

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Next Steps

Managing hybrid IT environments, which include hardware, software and cloud solutions from numerous suppliers, is getting harder. The organizational and technological silos between the IT operations and procurement teams present a challenge to successfully managing these complex environments.

IT asset management covers a variety of aspects of a business’s inventory. In the long term, a company’s success or failure in its hardware and software base can make or break that organization. Your company can succeed if you have the right plan in place and the necessary resources on your side.

Ready to take the next step? Check out our comparison report to begin reviewing asset management solutions.

What ITAM initiative have you implemented in your organization? Let us know in the comments.