IT asset management: Boost efficiency with ITAM
Computers, software, and related technology represent some of a business’s most significant investments. They drive revenue and deliver a positive return on investment – if the company actively manages these assets.
Some companies use an ad hoc process to oversee their tech, but they’ll need a more robust asset management system as technology advances and becomes decentralized. IT asset management centralizes the process, ensuring businesses track resources and use them appropriately throughout their lifecycle to maximize their value.
What is IT asset management?
IT asset management (ITAM) is a regimented process that tracks and oversees the use of an organization’s fixed assets. The process covers all phases of the equipment’s life cycle, assuring management that it is:
Accounted for
Deployed
Maintained
Upgraded
Disposed of when no longer serviceable
IT assets fall into one of three categories. Here is a brief explanation of each:
1. Software
Software asset management is a more complex form of ITAM involving:
Compliance requirements
Licensing
Shadow IT
Internet of Things (IoT)
Resources must remain fluid to adjust to shifting requirements, changing market factors, and disruptive new technologies. This requires continuous monitoring and review.
Employees who customize their professional tools using subscription-based software downloaded from marketplaces and app stores present unique software management challenges. The process must be flexible enough to accommodate their needs while protecting and enabling the business.
2. Hardware
An IT ecosystem typically involves physical equipment beyond the standard laptop and PC. Various types of assets exist, including:
Printers
Copiers
Mobile devices
Servers
Network devices
Point of sale units
Data management hardware
These items must be maintained and upgraded regularly to meet contractual obligations and ensure continued viability.
3. Cloud services
Every day, more organizations switch to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) for networking and data storage, or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) databases and middleware. Jira Cloud is one well-known cloud service example. Companies must track the cost and usage of each cloud service to avoid redundancies and ensure compliance with licensing regulations.
IT resources have a finite lifespan. An organization with a proactive asset management system maximizes resource value by monitoring the total cost of ownership and optimizing use throughout its lifecycle. ITAM also delivers centralized, up-to-date information, allowing asset managers to:
Optimize budgets
Reduce risks and costs
Support lifecycle management
Support evidence-based decision-making
Objectives of IT asset management process
ITAM isn’t a one-and-done project. It’s an ongoing process executed by the IT team and led by the asset manager throughout every stage of an application or device’s lifecycle.
Although it may be customized, an IT asset’s lifecycle generally includes six phases:
Request: Stakeholders come together to determine the business case for acquiring an asset.
Fulfillment: Upon receipt of the request, the asset manager compares the item to in-house equipment to determine whether it’s needed to meet the outlined business need. If so, they move forward with procurement.
Deployment: Once the asset is available, technicians put it into service.
Monitoring: This phase focuses on increasing asset visibility, ensuring optimal usage, and identifying or mitigating operational risks. Data gathered informs future asset strategy.
Service: Regular service and upgrades ensure an asset remains optimally functional. It may also require emergency repairs.
Retirement: At the end of its lifecycle, the organization will dispose of and replace the asset according to established protocols to avoid security breaches.
Different management processes occur during these phases as goals and tools change. Here are some common tasks that fall to the IT team throughout an asset’s life cycle:
Asset inventory
The first step in any ITAM process is to inventory all IT assets. The list should include all available resources, their location, purchase date, and cost.
Life cycle cost assessment
IT professionals should calculate the total lifecycle costs incurred by every IT asset to ensure an accurate and actionable inventory. Additional expenditures include:
Maintenance
Capital
Yearly licensing fees
Disposal
Tracking
Asset management software like Flexera, Asset Panda, or ManageEngine AssetExplorer track and monitor:
Vendor contracts
Software licenses
Warranty expirations
Service schedules
Asset depreciation
Proactive reviews and audits allow IT teams to stay ahead of ITAM’s maintenance stage.
Maintenance
This task involves asset repair, upgrades, and replacement. The IT team records maintenance activities using the asset management tool to understand the resources’s overall performance.
Financial planning
An organization can begin financial planning once it fully understands its IT assets, resource positioning within the lifecycle, and costs. The goal is to budget the level of service your IT team must provide to maintain or improve an asset’s performance.
If an asset is delivering optimal performance, funding and service should continue at the current level. Lackluster results indicate the need for a higher level of service, increasing costs.
Benefits of IT asset management
ITAM provides benefits beyond organizing and tracking IT assets.
1. Establishes a single source of truth
An asset management tool tames chaos by consolidating an organization’s IT data into a single, searchable resource. The managing software does the heavy lifting of tracking down artifacts, monitoring usage, and interpreting dependencies so IT professionals can focus on high-level tasks.
2. Improves utilization, decreases risk, and cuts waste
Real-time data from inventory tracking software enables IT teams to eliminate waste and improve resource management. It also ensures the company complies with legal and security policies, reducing the risk of privacy breaches and regulatory penalties.
3. Boosts productivity while maintaining reliability
Companies that embrace DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) principles increasingly rely on infrastructure and platform services to improve efficiency. Asset management systems let IT oversee the consumption of on-demand services while avoiding overprovisioning and idle instances that rack up unnecessary costs.
4. Supports IT and business practices
IT asset management systems also support IT service management (ITSM) and IT infrastructure libraries (ITIL) with change, incident, and problem management. HR and finance groups leverage ITAM tools to map critical resources and their dependencies, helping them:
Track assets
Establish security remediation measures
Manage operations
5. Reduces costs
Organizations consolidate data by consistently assessing IT licenses, instances, and resources. These routine audits allow them to optimize their IT budgets by revealing which assets offer the best value and which drain their resources.
Best practices of IT asset management
Managing IT assets can be complex and challenging, but the following IT asset management best practices can set your organization up for success:
Secure executive buy-in
Select a team to pilot the management initiative
Define critical IT resources
List cloud-based assets
Identify discovery and data integration methods
Proactively and continuously track assets to avoid over-deploying
Decide whether to centralize data using a configuration management database (CMDB)
Automate processes with an asset management solution
Integrate data and ensure availability to the entire IT department
Insist on IT license familiarity
Fuel continuous improvement by gathering feedback (internally and from other business groups)
IT asset management with Tempo
Tempo’s Capacity Planner will help you determine whether your project team has the IT resources it needs. This capacity planning tool helps visualize teams, plans, and shared resources so you can make informed sourcing and allocation decisions.
As you plan your projects, you may require certain team members with particular skill sets to deliver on time and on budget. Knowing the availability of these team members is crucial when project planning. These individuals – depending on their skill sets – may require particular equipment or assets to perform their job functions properly, so Capacity Planner can assist you in your asset management practices.
You can also leverage Strategic Roadmaps, Tempo’s roadmapping application, to illustrate IT strategies for managing assets so stakeholders can understand and align with your goals.
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