To successfully track your IT assets, your company needs transparency, visibility, and forecasting. In the past, IT asset management (ITAM) was just a side task. But today, like those solutions found on this site here, it is an important part of looking after your resources. Plus, ITAM directly impacts how you manage knowledge, problems, incidents, and change.
Choosing the Right Tool
One of the main reasons to use asset management software is that it can reduce your organization’s costs. But it can also improve compliance and efficiency while increasing the security of your intellectual property. It also puts you in a better position for negotiating new contracts and reduces your risks. Today, you have more options when it comes to choosing a tool to improve your asset collection. Any tool needs to let you easily import data and have a clearly defined relationship between users and your resources. You should be able to easily integrate it with business and IT systems.
Managing Your Hardware
Hardware is a broad term that refers to many items you can find in an IT environment, such as routers, desktops, phones, hubs, and monitors. When you are creating a tracking solution for each piece of hardware, ensure that it allows you to uniquely identify each piece. To optimize your hardware, you should store as much extra information as you can, including support contracts, warranty, and maintenance. When you’re first adding this type of asset, create a unique way to identify it with information such as model, make, or location. You’ll also want to include the serial number and what its role is. After adding each piece of hardware, you’ll need to create a process for entering in new assets as you acquire them.
Managing Software
Because cloud computing has become so widely implemented, it is now necessary to track software assets as well. It allows you to ensure that you appropriately use software licenses and only add approved applications to the cloud. This is perhaps one of the most important aspects of your IT asset management checklist to include. If you don’t handle them correctly, it could cost your organization millions of dollars. ITAM allows you to be prepared for a potential audit, which is particularly important if you work with large software vendors that tend to be more aggressive. By using the right solution, you’ll be better equipped to make changes, especially if you have a large company. These tools offer you as much control as possible over IT resources. Many offer similar features:
- Inventory management
- Software configuration
- License management
- Deployment
- Lifecycle management
- Reporting
When looking at tools, look for characteristics that can help you optimize your costs to improve the performance of your business. Remember, whenever there is a change in your organization, such as an employee move in the company, that employee needs to get an updated set of assets. Create a workflow to cover the procurement of new resources and recovery of assets when an employee leaves the company. You’ll also need a process for stolen or lost ones. These steps will require working with the human resources department to communicate information about levels of permission for each user.
