IT Asset Management (ITAM)

IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and being used.

So, what’s an IT asset? Defined simply, an IT asset includes hardware, software systems, or information an organization values. In Atlassian’s IT department, some of our most important assets are the computers and software licenses that help us build, sell, and support our software and the servers we host it on.

IT assets have a finite period of use. To maximize the value an organization can generate from them, the IT asset lifecycle can be proactively managed. Each organization may define unique stages of that lifecycle, but they generally include planning, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. An important part of IT asset management is applying process across all lifecycle stages to understand the total cost of ownership and optimize the use of assets.

In the past, IT departments were able to control assets within their own domain. Now, an organization’s asset management practice extends far beyond the hardware that’s issued with an official IT stamp of approval. Subscription-based software and employees expectation to customize the tools they work with through marketplaces and app stores, present new asset management challenges. The way modern teams work requires that IT teams be flexible and adapt their asset management process to best enable the business.

As various teams push to work with the tools that best fit their needs, asset management is an even more important part of an organization’s overall strategy and provides up-to-date information to reduce risks and costs. An asset management process creates a single source of truth when optimizing budgets, supporting lifecycle management, and making decisions that impact the entire organization.

As teams outside of IT begin to embrace service management, asset management has also become important to a variety of departments. We’ve heard of organizations using asset management software to manage things ranging from fleets, to fish, to insurance, to musical instruments.

Spreadsheets are still one of the most common ways that companies start tracking what they own. Think they stay accurate very long? No way. They quickly become inaccurate or unwieldy. In fact, Sage Accounting found that a $2 million company using spreadsheets to track their assets could be spending as much as $50,000 a year on “ghost assets,” or items that they are paying and accounting for in their general ledger but that are physically missing.

At the heart of all this is the CMDB which should be carefully planed and designed, as this is the heart of the management system, and in that the Best Practices Methodology that your firm should be utilizing. This Database must be well organized, protected, and have the ability to scale.