IT Asset Management (ITAM) ensures valuable items, both tangible and intangible, are being tracked and used within an organisation. These include such assets as hardware, software, or critical information that holds value to a business. In an IT department, some of the most important assets are the computers, software licenses and hosting servers.
According to Pamela Wheelwright, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, “Most organisations do not have a formal IT asset management (ITAM) programme but recognise the need to implement one in support of their digital business objectives.” Awareness seems to be one thing, but implementation is quite another when it comes to ITAM and software asset management (SAM). As Deloitte’s Global ITAM survey report in 2021 showed, organisations are rethinking how they invest in governing IT assets and license their hardware and software.
Nerys Mutlow, Evangelist in the Chief Innovation Office at ServiceNow, states that the problem lies in manual working: “When software assets are tracked manually by using spreadsheets, for example, it can result in the inventory being incomplete, inaccurate and out of date. This makes it incredibly hard to challenge vendor audits, exposing businesses to compliance risk and significant fines. ITAM provides visibility and control over software assets, allowing organisations to get a complete view of IT resources across on-premises and cloud environments. Ultimately, this makes ITAM an important element in the strategic decision-making process, by providing valuable data to help businesses make good technology choices and improve their returns on investments over time.”
IT assets have a finite period that they can be used, so the lifecycle must be proactively managed at all stages. According to Atlassian, who develop software and collaboration tools, these stages usually include: planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. Having an overlying ITAM strategy is vital to understanding the total cost of ownership and optimising the use of assets.
IT departments must also be agile to deal with subscription-based software and employees' expectation to customise the tools they work with, which are typically accessed through app stores or marketplaces.
PwC insists that if an organisation has a considerable software spend, they may be spending too much or under-utilising these assets. They list these initiatives as the most common part of ITAM strategy:
- Optimise software costs
- Drive down software and infrastructure costs
- Increase procurement efficiency
- Improve compliance
- Increase asset and intellectual property security
- Reduce financial, contractual and reputation risk
- Decrease support costs
- Reduce resource requirements
0 Comments