In order to create a valuable IT Asset Management plan, it’s important to know why IT Asset Management exists in the first place. IT Asset Management is a set of business practices that join together the physical, technological, financial, contractual, and inventory functions in the business process to support the Lifecycle management to better the IT environment and make it more strategic, cost effective, simpler, and efficient.
Simply put, IT Asset Management manages the building blocks of an organization’s IT infrastructure. As IT systems evolve, many organizations loose face with the expected knowledge they should have with their own IT asset infrastructure. Other businesses have limited visibility of their planned and actual asset inventory.
IT Asset Management can help an organization define and control its IT infrastructure by maintaining data about the historical and current state of all its assets. Therefor you can curate better IT Asset Management plans, and optimize your IT infrastructure better. Ways to optimize your IT infrastructure include: Making sure your organization are compliant with its software licenses and to prepare your organization for audits and to reduce legal, as well as security risks. Streamlined asset management plans can also bring down IT costs.
A valuable IT Asset Management plan will include:
A Map
To create a valuable IT Asset Management plan, you should always map your assets. Having an asset database inventory with no bird’s eye view of what components the asset is connected to and what services that asset would affect in case of failure would be pointless. Building a relationship map using different relationship types and knowing who uses your assets will give you a good overview of your IT infrastructure setup. Once you create your dependencies across your assets, you can start building your CMDB. A business service can be mapped to other entities using relationships such as “depends on,” “connected to,” “runs on,” “impacts other services” and “receive data from.”
Using the right IT Asset Management tool for your business
The right IT Asset Management tool should be able to provide for you the dashboard you need in order to monitor the lifecycle of an asset from procurement to its retirement. The right IT asset Management tool will function with your other service management tools, such as purchase management, vendor management, contract management, and software licensing. This tie in of IT Asset Management and other service management tools should ensure effortless functionality.
Establish a central asset repository
Using a variety of scan and discovery operating system techniques, you will have to build your inventory by documenting all of your IT hardware and software components.
Continuously manage and monitor the lifecycles of your assets
Updated information of your lifecycle assets lets you stay current. It also gives you the ability to have control over your assets and makes effective purchase decisions.
Extend Asset management to ITIL Processes
Integrating your IT Asset Management with other ITIL processes to help IT personal make informed decisions.
Automate Alerts and notifications
It’s important to communicate proactively. It’s important to notify stakeholders about changes in your asset infrastructure via automatic alerts and notifications.
Share and report your Asset Data
Showing detailed asset-related reports will frequently give the decision makers a regularly updated snapshot of your IT infrastructure. Quantify and notify your Asset Data reports.
Be safe, every day is an IT Audit day
Get ready to be audited, make sure you’re always prepared for an IT audit. Preparing for IT audits makes sure that your IT infrastructure is clean and will track your IT expenditures for better decision making.
Add your non-IT assets to you IT Asset Management plan
After setting up your central repository for tracking and maintaining all your IT assets, it would be best to add your non-IT assets, such as generators, air conditioning units, refrigerators, furniture’s etc. It will help your organizations understand its financial spending better so they can revise your budget.
These steps will help you build a better IT Asset Management plan. Now, after implementing your IT Asset Management plan, it’s important to visualize, analyze, monitor, and improve on your IT Asset Management plan from here on in and for the future of your IT asset management plan.