It Asset Management

IT ASSET MANAGEMENT

Submitted By

MEET KHOLIA

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

ABSTRACT

IT infrastructure is growing fast and we know it! Every day thousands of new users are added. With new users, new IT Assets - both hardware and software, has to be added. IT issues can be resolved quickly and efficiently if you have visibility into all IT assets present in an organization.

IT assets also play a crucial role in almost every IT Services and also affects management, cost and risk. To mitigate the risk and reduce cost, organizations need to know their assets well. Simple questions like “what, how and where” helps a lot in decisions. What assets they have, how and by whom it can be used and where to use it to achieve maximum efficiency.

This paper will include ITAM (IT asset management) in IT Service management, benefits of ITAM and some of the ITAM optimizations processes as follows:

ITAM organizational, process and best practice awareness

Managing ITAM and ITSM data

Asset-to-asset and asset-to-service interdependencies

Automation OpEx efficiencies and reduce human error

This paper will also include what is ITAM in detail, why it is very useful and also some strategies to provide effective ITAM like IT Asset Provisioning and Automated Inventory Management. This paper will show how effective asset management can become a building block not only for service management but also for operations as a whole and even for development. ITAM and ITSM work very closely together. The paper will also try to cover how ITAM and ITSM are stronger together by giving an example of an organization following the same practice.  

1. ITAM Introduction

IT asset management (ITAM) is the set of business practices that join financial, contractual and inventory functions to support life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment. Assets include all elements of software and hardware that are found in the business environment. (Kempter, 2015). ITAM is a part of Service transition which is one of the practices for ITIL framework. Service transition also includes Change Management, Release and Deployment Management, Validation and testing and so on.  

All the IT Services depends totally on IT Assets. To reduce the risk and optimize the cost, the organization should know what assets they have, where they are used, who is using them and how plus how much do they cost.  Managing IT assets can help the organization to get maximum utilization of assets, handling IT inventory (purchase decisions and processes) and cost cutting.  Properly performed ITAM also helps organizations with vendor discounts and standards which can improve efficiency and reliability.