A guide to IT asset management best practices to optimize your IT assets

We’re at a pivotal moment in technology, where digital footprints shift rapidly, making strong IT asset management more essential than ever. IT assets serve as the foundation of your entire IT ecosystem. So, which best practices can help you manage them efficiently? Here’s how top-performing teams take control and maximize the value of their IT assets with smart, strategic approaches.

What is IT Asset Management (ITAM)?

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the process of tracking and optimizing an organization’s IT assets throughout their lifecycle. Effective ITAM ensures control over the tech environment, including hardware assets, software, networks, and cloud resources. Done right, ITAM transforms from an operational task into a powerful lever for growth and resilience.

The foundation of any successful ITAM program lies in:

• Real-time visibility

• Accurate data

• Clear governance

• Strategic alignment with broader business objectives

Why are ITAM best practices crucial for organizations?

ITAM best practices help organizations gain visibility, reduce costs, ensure compliance, and improve overall operational efficiency. ITAM best practices should be a business priority since they help:

• Avoid wasteful spending: Unused licenses, duplicate tools, and underutilized hardware quietly drain budgets. ITAM identifies and eliminates this hidden waste.

• Improve productivity and IT service delivery: With accurate asset data, IT teams are able to resolve issues faster and support employees with minimal disruption.

• Ensure license and regulatory compliance: Proactive tracking helps avoid costly audits and reputational damage by staying compliant with vendor and regulatory requirements.

• Enhance security and reduce risk: Understanding what’s in your environment is the first step to protecting it. ITAM uncovers blind spots and vulnerabilities and helps enforce security policies.

Common mistakes to avoid in IT asset management

According to Deloitte’s global ITAM survey, 84% of respondents believe their organizations do not have a truly effective ITAM program. Additionally, a large percentage of respondents identified rapidly changing business and regulatory and technology environments as the biggest barriers to improving ITAM maturity. 

To move beyond reactive asset tracking and into true optimization, it's essential to recognize where most organizations go wrong. Below are key missteps and how you can course-correct with best practices in IT asset management.

Key components of ITAM

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is not merely a process but a strategic approach to identifying, maintaining, upgrading, and responsibly disposing of vital components. It can transcend a singular project, evolving into an ongoing discipline that demands meticulous planning, seamless execution, and continual refinement. 

The process encompasses:

Inventory: Aggregating and cataloging information pertaining to all organizational IT assets, including details such as location, ownership, status, configuration, and interdependencies.

Lifecycle: Effectively overseeing the complete lifecycle of IT assets, from procurement and deployment to maintenance, utilization, and eventual retirement.

Optimization: Striving to extract maximum value and performance from IT assets while concurrently minimizing associated risks and costs.

Compliance: Upholding adherence to pertinent policies, standards, and regulations, spanning licensing, security, and environmental requisites, to ensure IT assets align seamlessly with organizational goals, legal requirements, and risk management practices.

Benefits of IT asset management tools

IT asset management (ITAM) offers numerous advantages for an organization. By effectively organizing assets, it provides clear insights into the inventory, highlighting essential resources and identifying those that are superfluous. Here are some key benefits that showcase the true potential of effective IT asset management (ITAM) for your organization:

• Cost savings: By eliminating unnecessary purchases, optimizing utilization, and averting penalties and fines, ITAM contributes to a reduction in the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of IT assets. 

• Risk mitigation: ITAM plays a pivotal role in risk prevention and management by addressing IT-related risks, such as security breaches, data loss, compliance violations, and service disruptions. 

• Performance improvement: Enhancing the availability, reliability, and efficiency of IT assets is a hallmark of ITAM. By ensuring proper configuration, regular updates, and timely maintenance, ITAM helps identify and resolve issues swiftly and effectively, offering accurate information about IT assets and their dependencies.

• Business alignment: ITAM aligns IT assets with the organization's business needs and goals, providing visibility of the value and impact of IT assets. Furthermore, it supports strategic decision-making and planning by furnishing data and analytics on IT asset performance and trends.

What to consider when selecting the right ITAM platform

Selecting the right ITAM platform is pivotal for a successful ITAM program. Key considerations include:

• Alignment with the organization's specific needs

• Integration with existing IT systems

• Scaling with organizational growth

• Maintaining user-friendly usability

• Scalable adaptability

• User-friendly interface

• Clear reporting

The asset management system should offer features covering inventory, lifecycle, optimization, and compliance management while supporting diverse IT asset types, such as hardware, software, cloud, mobile, and IoT devices. 

It should also include seamless integration with tools such as:

• Service desk

• Configuration management

• Network management

• Security management 

• Existing data centers or sources to prevent duplication and inconsistency

Best practices for implementing an ITAM program

Implementing an ITAM program is not a simple task but a complex and ongoing process that requires careful planning, execution, and improvement. Here are some best practices for implementing an ITAM program:

Assign responsibility and establish roles

IT  asset management (ITAM) goes beyond the IT department. It requires cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders from finance, procurement, legal, and various business units. Clearly defining roles and responsibilities is essential for success:

• Sponsor: Sets the vision, provides strategic direction, and ensures the program aligns with overall business goals.

• Manager: Leads and coordinates the ITAM program, including managing resources and team performance.

• Team: Carries out core tasks such as asset inventory, lifecycle management, optimization, and compliance across different IT asset types.

• Users: Use IT assets and contribute valuable feedback to improve the program.

Create a clear ITAM strategy

An ITAM strategy is a concise document outlining the ITAM program's scope, objectives, and roadmap, detailing policies, processes, and procedures governing ITAM activities. Follow the steps given below to create a clear ITAM strategy:

Step 1: Define what you consider an IT asset

An IT asset encompasses hardware, software, or data vital for organizational operations and goals. However, not all assets hold equal importance for ITAM. It's crucial to define precisely what qualifies as an IT asset within your ITAM program. Criteria may include:

• Financial and operational value

• Risk factors

• Complexity of configuration

Step 2: Name and tag your IT assets accordingly

Assigning unique identifiers and attributes to each IT asset is a vital phase in IT Asset Management (ITAM). This process of naming and tagging enables efficient identification, tracking, and management of IT assets throughout their lifecycle. Key elements involved in naming and tagging IT assets include:

• ID number

• Name

• Asset type

• Status

• Location

Step 3: Utilize software licensing solutions for compliance

Software audits can be expensive, with some businesses reporting costs of $25 million or more over just three years. Software license, a legal agreement governing software use, entails specific terms like user count, devices, duration, or features. Ensuring compliance involves aligning software usage with the agreed license terms to prevent unauthorized or unlawful use.

Establish clear policies and procedures

Policies and procedures are the linchpin of ITAM, governing activities like inventory management, lifecycle, optimization, and compliance management. They bring standardization and efficiency to ITAM processes by defining roles, responsibilities, inputs, and outputs and employing tools like workflows, scripts, and APIs. This not only streamlines operations but also facilitates the automation and integration of ITAM tasks.

Policies and procedures also ensure the quality and consistency of ITAM data. They guarantee the accuracy and reliability of information by stipulating data sources, formats, and standards and employing validation methods. These guidelines also play a pivotal role in maintaining data integrity through practices like cleansing, deduplication, and synchronization. 

Policies and procedures also enforce accountability and compliance within ITAM practices, setting expectations, requirements, performance indicators, measures, and reporting mechanisms. This framework not only ensures adherence but also establishes a robust foundation for monitoring, analyzing, and enhancing ITAM practices over time.

Track the entire lifecycle of assets

The IT asset lifecycle, from acquisition to disposal, plays a pivotal role in ITAM. Efficient asset tracking optimizes asset utilization and performance, aligning with business needs and ensuring regular maintenance. This process supports cost and value management by aligning asset procurement and renewals with budget limitations. 

Perform regular audits and maintenance checks

Regular audits and maintenance checks serve as critical components of asset management solutions, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and currency of IT asset information. These IT infrastructure management practices help identify and correct discrepancies in asset data, ensuring alignment and synchronization across the broader IT environment. 

Audits and maintenance checks are instrumental in identifying and eliminating waste or inefficiency in ITAM processes and optimizing resource usage. They play a key role in ensuring and demonstrating ITAM compliance and quality, validating adherence to policies, standards, and regulations, and providing documented evidence of ITAM outcomes.

Automate asset discovery and tracking processes

Asset discovery and tracking are fundamental processes within ITAM, focused on continuously locating and monitoring IT assets, including details like location, owner, status, configuration, and dependencies. These processes can be automated to maintain a critical, comprehensive and accurate ITAM inventory. 

Asset discovery and tracking play a key role in effective asset lifecycle management and utilization control by leveraging workflows, scripts, or APIs to automate and streamline processes. These processes also play a pivotal role in monitoring and measuring key metrics, including availability, reliability, and efficiency, using automated tools such as dashboards, reports, or alerts.

Develop a comprehensive financial management solution

Financial management in ITAM is critical for planning, overseeing, and reporting the financial aspects associated with IT assets, including costs, revenue, and budgets. Its significance lies in optimizing the costs and value of IT assets by aligning acquisitions with budget constraints and ensuring adherence to license terms. This process makes use of methods such as depreciation and valuation to enhance overall asset value and return on investment. 

Financial management enables comprehensive tracking and reporting of IT asset financial performance through tools such as accounting and billing, providing organizations with valuable insights into their financial standing and outcomes.

Monitor cost of ownership across all assets

Cost of ownership is a comprehensive measure encompassing the total expenditure involved in acquiring, maintaining, and disposing of an IT asset. Within the realm of ITAM, the cost of ownership serves as a pivotal metric, offering several advantages. 

It facilitates the comparison and selection of the best IT asset options, employing methods like cost-benefit analysis, total cost of ownership (TCO), and return on investment (ROI). Cost of ownership helps optimize and reduce IT asset expenses by identifying and removing unnecessary, redundant, or obsolete assets. It also aligns and justifies IT asset investments by using cost allocation and recovery methods to fairly distribute expenses among stakeholders and beneficiaries.

Provide visibility into physical, mobile devices, and technology assets

Visibility into physical, mobile devices, and technology assets, encompassing hardware assets, software or digital assets, SaaS, mobile, and IoT devices, is indispensable for effective ITAM. This visibility enables organizations to manage and control their IT asset inventory and lifecycle using specialized tools such as scanners, agents, or sensors. 

Visibility into physical, mobile devices, and technology assets also facilitates the real-time update and refresh of the IT asset inventory by employing triggers, events, or schedules to detect and incorporate any changes or updates in the IT asset information. 

Furthermore, this visibility empowers organizations to monitor and measure the performance and value of IT assets through the use of ITAM tools. Various tools such as dashboards, reports, and alerts are used to present key metrics and indicators, including availability, reliability, and efficiency.

Create security policies to protect critical assets

Security policies governing access, protection, and recovery of IT assets play a pivotal role in ITAM. These policies are instrumental in preventing and managing IT-related risks, such as security breaches, data loss, compliance violations, or service disruptions. 

Security policies leverage security tools and techniques such as encryption, authentication, and backups to safeguard and restore IT assets and their data. Security policies also ensure and demonstrate IT asset security and license compliance by verifying adherence to relevant policies, standards, and regulations, encompassing licensing, security, and environmental requirements. 

They contribute to providing and reporting evidence of IT asset security and compliance through mechanisms such as auditing, testing, or certification, offering a robust framework for safeguarding organizational assets.

Leverage service management tools for incident response and resolution

IT service management tools, encompassing applications for service desk, configuration management, change management, and incident management, play a crucial role in incident response and resolution within ITAM software. These tools are instrumental in detecting and resolving IT asset issues and incidents. 

Leveraging techniques like tickets, workflows, and escalations, they record and process problems and requests related to IT assets, such as failures, errors, or malfunctions. Additionally, service management tools aid in diagnosing and troubleshooting issues. They utilize log alerts and perform root cause analysis to identify and rectify the causes and effects of IT asset problems. 

These tools also contribute to enhancing information technology asset availability, reliability, and efficiency through:

• Monitoring and measurement of service levels

• Customer satisfaction

• Optimization of service quality and performance

Leveraging technology to enhance ITAM practices

Modern IT environments move too fast for manual processes and disconnected tools to keep up. That’s why automation, AI, and cloud-based solutions become so important for your business. 

Here’s how:

• Automation enables real-time updates, faster onboarding/offboarding, and error-free audits. It starts anticipating asset failures and flagging anomalies before they become issues. The result? Smarter decision-making and a leaner, more responsive IT operation.

• Cloud-native ITAM platforms offer agility and scalability which traditional systems can’t match. They centralize data, integrating effortlessly with other IT tools. As hybrid and remote workforces expand, cloud-based ITAM ensures your teams can manage assets from anywhere. Additionally, built-in analytics and dashboards make it easier to transform data into action. 

How to get started with IT asset management

Embarking on the IT asset management process might seem daunting, but it's achievable with these steps:

• Evaluate your ITAM status: Begin by assessing your current ITAM maturity and identifying gaps using tools like the ITAM Process Maturity Self-Assessment Tool. This reveals your capabilities, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.

• Establish vision and goals: Define your ITAM vision and goals using frameworks like ISO/IEC 19770. Align these with your business strategy, setting the scope, objectives, and roadmap for your ITAM initiative.

• Choose platform and tools: Select the right IT asset management software and tools by evaluating criteria such as functionality, integration, scalability, and usability. This ensures you pick a solution tailored to your specific needs.

• Implement program and processes: Execute your ITAM program and processes based on best practices. Assign responsibilities, establish roles, create a clear strategy, and define your IT assets for inventory, lifecycle, optimization, and compliance management.

• Monitor and enhance performance: Keep track of your ITAM performance using metrics like cost of ownership, return on investment, and service level agreements. Use feedback and analysis, including audits and maintenance checks, to identify and implement improvements periodically.

How Freshservice supports IT asset management best practices

You need a platform purpose-built to scale with your IT ecosystem in order to effectively implement information technology asset management best practices. Freshservice’s unified IT management platform delivers just that. 

Designed with modern IT operations in mind, Freshservice brings together powerful capabilities to streamline every aspect of ITAM. These include:

• Native and connected discovery solutions for more efficient service delivery process planning and inventory management.

• Holistic visibility into cloud dependencies so you can manage and automate cloud resources across multiple providers in a single unified cloud catalog.

• A rich single view of SaaS subscriptions to help you identify underutilized applications with granular, app-specific usage data and optimize SaaS spending.

• Integrated identity providers to discover and optimize usage of your software assets.

• A unified contract management solution that automates contract renewals and expiration tracking, helping you maintain accurate records of contracts and software licenses throughout their lifecycle.