Get Started with Itam: It Asset Management Explained

Which tech-enabled tools do you use to get your work done daily? Weekly? Monthly? It’s probably not a short list. Sometimes, you realize a forgotten tool is way better for a task than the tool you’ve been using. It happens to all of us.

From a company perspective, tools that are underutilized are a waste—and a risk. These tools could present security risks or compliance issues, cost more than their value to the business, and slow productivity.

But keeping up with these countless tools—assets—is no small task. This is where IT asset management (ITAM) comes in. Let’s take a look at:

• ITAM
• IT assets
• Benefits
• Who, what, when, how
• Tools
• And more!

What is IT asset management?

IT asset management is an IT practice with the goal of keeping tabs on all IT assets, in order to assess when to make changes and identify which changes to make. IT asset management helps you gain visibility of your assets in order to see the value delivered by each piece. We can sum up the two main activities in ITAM as:

1. Tracking the financial value of each asset—that is, how much value the asset is providing to the company.
2. Determining when to upgrade/retire/expire assets due to depreciation or end-of-lifing.

The tricky part is that neither of these are particularly easy. That’s why companies often struggle with or altogether fail at ITAM efforts.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way. The best ITAM practices can reduce risk, increase ROI, and even promote collaboration across teams when necessary, rolling out only the most useful tools for practices like DevOps, ChatOps, and more.

Types of IT assets

So, what exactly are the IT assets you’ll be managing? It’s a big category, which is why the ITAM practice can be unwieldy.

An asset is defined as anything that is useful or valuable within a product or service. This value is generally determined financially: how much an asset costs versus how much it saves.

If this definition feels all-encompassing, you’re not wrong. As Joseph Mathenge explains, “an asset could be your company’s capital, or the knowledge inside one developer’s head.” Generally speaking, IT assets can include:

• Hardware
• Network infrastructure components
• On-prem software
• Services and solutions that you subscribe to (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, etc.)
• Intangibles (knowledge, patents, etc.)

Obviously, some of these are easier to manage than others: it’s fairly easy to track hardware components, but how do you track the knowledge a person or team may hold? And, with the explosive growth of cloud-based software, you can imagine how difficult tracking all the various options could be.

That’s why you’ll categorize assets based on a few factors, such as:

• Speed: static vs rapid. A low speed asset, like a physical server rack, will likely stay in its data center for years. A high-speed asset, such as a cloud server instance, can exist for just a few minutes or hours How does speed effect procurement, provisioning, retirement, etc.?
• Consumption: individual vs shared. An individual asset—laptop, cell phone—is usually used by a very small group of people, but the devices support countless functions and services. By contrast, a server is used by many people indirectly, but it likely underpins just one service.