What is IT asset management (ITAM)?

Too often, assets get tracked in a ton of different places, by a ton of different people.  No single person owns things, and no single tool collects and centralizes the information. Naturally, chaos and inaccuracy follow. It’s difficult to make informed decisions.  There are even companies where people are being employed just to keep track of IT assets. Systems should do this work. Without having to relegate time and brain matter to tracking artifacts, monitoring usage, and understanding dependencies, IT employees can focus more on what matters most to the organization.  Asset management brings order, and offers a single source of truth for IT teams, management, and ultimately, entire organizations.

Asset management keeps information updated, so teams eliminate waste and improve utilization. It saves money by helping avoid unnecessary purchases and cutting licensing and support costs. Increased control also enforces compliance with security and legal policies and reduces risks. The positive implications on costs and productivity benefit the entire organization.

With digital transformation changing the way organizations operate, modern asset management goes far beyond tracking laptops and mice. Teams are embracing DevOps and SRE principles, and need asset management processes and tools in order to efficiently deliver new functionality and services quickly without compromising on reliability. In the report Prepare Your IT Asset Management for 2020, Gartner notes that given the increased reliance on platform and infrastructure services, effective asset management can enable organizations to manage their consumption of “on-demand services.” With increased control, visibility, and assigned responsibility, teams can reduce excess consumption including overprovisioning, and idle instances, avoiding unnecessary costs. 

IT asset management is critical to supporting ITIL processes, including change, incident, and problem management. The IT team enables the entire organization to get more innovative and deliver value more quickly. With the right data at their fingertips, teams can move with speed and predict the impact of changes before they happen. By democratizing access to insights, the organization gains a competitive edge, delivering value more quickly.  Any organization trying to keep up with the pace of modern innovation needs to get strategic about controlling, tracking, and mastering IT data.

IT asset management is not a project. You don’t do it once and expect it to be finished. ITAM is a process that teams execute on a regular basis or as assets, goals, and tools change. 

1. Inventory assets - The first step in the IT asset management process is to create a detailed inventory of all IT assets. Your inventory includes what assets you have, where they are located when they were purchased, and for how much. 
2. Calculate lifecycle costs - The second step is to calculate lifecycle costs for all assets in your inventory. During an average asset’s life, there are many opportunities for added costs, like maintenance, capital, and disposal costs. Calculating lifecycle costs makes your asset inventory accurate and actionable.
3. Tracking -  The third step is tracking via an asset management tool. Your goal is to continuously monitor IT assets through their lifecycle keeping a close eye on things like contract, license, and warranty expiration. Tracking also helps you stay ahead of the fourth step, maintenance.  
4. Maintenance - Maintenance involves asset repair, upgrade, and replacement. All maintenance activities should be tracked in an ITAM tool so that the data can be used to understand the overall performance of the asset. 
5. Financial Planning - The fifth and final step is financial planning. With an accurate picture of your IT assets, their lifecycle stage, and their costs, you can effectively plan for the future. One goal of financial planning is to determine the budget needed to maintain or improve the “levels of service” your team provides for your most important assets. An asset that was successfully managed with a high level of service, like a service desk and dedicated team, will need that level of service going forward. Assets that underperformed may need a higher level of service in the future, which will cost more. 

Getting started with IT asset management can seem like a daunting task, but by following the ITIL 4 principle of "Start where you are," you can set yourself up for success. Instead of trying to overhaul your entire system at once, begin by evaluating and analyzing your current processes and infrastructure. This will allow you to identify areas that need improvement and make gradual changes to optimize your asset management strategy. Achieve quick wins by focusing on the most critical aspects of your business and addressing your biggest pain points first.

You’ll want to choose software and an approach that meets your current needs and can grow with your organization. As your requirements shift, you'll need a flexible solution that can adapt to emerging needs.

Embracing a culture of collaboration and transparency is essential for successful IT asset management. Make sure the right people can access the information they need when they need it. This will foster a more efficient and productive working environment.

For more detailed guidance on getting started with IT asset management, consider exploring our free Asset and Configuration Management Handbook, or learn more about IT asset management best practices.

As you begin to consider different asset management software vendors, start with assessing why you need to improve your approach to asset management. Here are some of the common signs that show you’re ready for asset management software:

As reliance on software, infrastructure, and platform services continues to increase, one of the keys to cutting costs is optimizing spending on these services. According to Gartner research, “many organizations can cut spending on software by as much as 30 percent” using best practices to optimize software licenses.  This isn’t an easy task to complete manually. Gartner writes “Optimizing complex licenses manually is labor-intensive; it requires specialized knowledge and does not scale. Larger enterprises will need a SAM (Software Asset Management) tool. A SAM tool can automate, accelerate and improve manual processes. It can pay dividends over manual alternatives, and can often pay for itself.”

Spreadsheets are still one of the most common ways that companies start tracking what they own. Think they stay accurate very long? No way. They quickly become inaccurate or unwieldy. In fact, Sage Accounting found that a $2 million company using spreadsheets to track their assets could be spending as much as $50,000 a year on “ghost assets,” or items that they are paying and accounting for in their general ledger but that are physically missing. Yikes.

Five new headsets arrived today. Four employees had their laptops stolen at a restaurant in Tuscaloosa. Next month, ten printers are getting switched out with new models from the leasing company, and the month after that, 14 laptops. If you need an employee - even part time - to keep track of everything, you need a basic system to make the job easier.

More and more often, applications, licenses, and other IT assets are being purchased, managed, and used in “the shadows,” without the knowledge of  the central IT team. Software that makes collaboration easier can keep IT in the loop, enabling other teams to be more productive, and avoiding risk and unnecessary costs. 

Once you know the time is right, thinking through what implementing a new approach to asset management will look like for your organization will help further clarify which software will best support your needs. In our experience, taking an asset inventory is the first step to get a better understanding of what is where and your costs. From there, it’s possible to map asset lifecycles and evaluate costs alongside your finance department.  

More advanced IT asset management goes beyond this step and automates routine asset management tasks. For instance, an employee can use a self-service portal to request a license to a common software subscription. Using pre-existing rules, that request can be approved with a link sent to provide access to the subscription to the requester. This reduces the amount of effort IT teams expend on support tasks, so they can focus on higher level work. 

Collaboration is also an important part of effective asset management. Instead of purchases happening in the shadows, a collaborative tool makes it easy for employees to make requests, and for other teams like procurement to comment on and approve purchases. And, if you can connect your asset management tool to services employees already use, even better. For instance, link to Slack, so an employee can make a request in a few taps on their keyboard. Improving the intake process for asset requests goes far in improving the IT team’s visibility. 

It’s worth noting that a service desk is an important foundation for this. It offers an easy way for employees to ask for help, plus it gives IT staff the ability to organize and provide reporting on requests. A service desk linked to asset management software, gives IT teams important context to deliver better service. For example, when a user requests a laptop repair, certain basic information is automatically available: including purchase date, previous issues, etc. The IT team can also access any tickets linked to that laptop. This quick and complete context means faster resolution of customer issues.

As IT continues to evolve, reliance shifts increasingly to SaaS vendors for critical services, and it’s necessary to track changes in increasingly dynamic cloud environments, asset management is adapting. It’s important that you choose the tools that can best enable collaboration and support your service management practice. 

Every organization is different. Maybe you need to map complicated dependencies across an enterprise. You might want to keep record of intangible assets like licenses and compliance documents to reduce risk. Perhaps your requirements are simpler and involve tracking an inventory of computers. 

Fortunately, asset management software comes in all flavors, from nimble and affordable integrations, to complex, high-dollar solutions that can automatically discover all IP-based hardware on the network, wash the dishes piled up in your office's kitchen sink, and more. Whether you go with a lightweight tracker or an enterprise level system, the most important consideration is finding the option that will work best for your unique use case.