IT asset management (ITAM)is the management of all your IT hardware, software, and networking devices throughout the assets’ lifecycle, from procurement to retirement. The purpose is to ensure that your IT assets are implemented, supported, upgraded, and discarded when needed. IT Asset Management helps you improve efficiency and save money by tracking all your software and hardware assets in order to optimize their use.
IT asset data is often needed in a wide variety of IT projects and processes. Too often, this means IT assets are managed in different places by different people. The result: no one has a complete overview of all assets because there is no integrated tool that centralizes all information. Inevitably, discrepancies and inaccuracies crop up, which renders it impossible to make informed decisions.
Valuable time is wasted manually inventorying and updating asset data that may be inaccurate, prone to human error, and soon obsolete again. Whether it is collected in spreadsheets or by asset tracking software, it often only gathers data for one particular use case. All the while, the same data may have already been collected by a different team or department. By adopting IT Asset Management software, you can focus on what is most important to the organization, such as:
It’s all about bridging the gaps between silos by providing a single, trusted, common view for the IT team, so that individual IT departments can monitor, manage and control the parts of the network for which they are responsible.
As new hardware and software assets are introduced into an organization’s IT infrastructure, it becomes increasingly difficult to streamline your IT Asset Management. Managing various IT scenarios has resulted in the creation of silos, making it difficult to maintain a complete, universal view.
Every time a new scenario arises, a new ad-hoc inventory would need to be created that meets the needs of that scenario. As each tool collects only the data that pertains to its particular use case (cybersecurity, SAM, ITSM, etc.) none of the ITAM datasets are complete or universally applicable.
In the ITAM 2.0 model, IT Asset Management graduates from an afterthought to a complete function, in and of itself. Now, no matter what the IT scenario, the data is there, it’s accurate, and it’s ready to use.
Rather than collecting IT asset data to meet the criteria of specific IT scenarios, we believe ITAM should be a scenario-independent endeavor, with the goal of creating a single source of truth.
The only viable solution is one that is laser-focused on accuracy, breadth, and depth and providing complete visibility into the IT estate. In this way, organizations can create an always-accurate single source of truth to inform all IT scenarios and strategic decision-making across the entire organization. Learn more about Technology Asset Intelligence.
As long as the drive behind asset discovery is based on satisfying the needs of isolated IT scenarios, there will never be a universal, complete and always up-to-date system of record. And, you will need to build a new adhoc inventory each time a new question arises on the IT estate costing precious time and resources.
Lansweeper is helping companies elevate ITAM from a niche specialty into the foundation for a modern, well-managed IT organization. Discovering IT is our core function – not an afterthought to support specific IT use cases. We help organizations create an always-accurate single source of truth that can be leveraged to support any and every IT use case with asset management software.
To maximize the value of your IT assets, it’s more crucial than ever to know your IT. However, 3 in 10 organizations report that they don’t know what assets they own, where they are located or who is using them.
Explore all our features, free for 14 days.
