IT Asset Management ITAM

17 September 2021 Cem Solmaz

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a set of business applications that combines IT assets across business units within the organization. It combines financial, inventory, contracting and risk management responsibilities to manage the overall lifecycle of these assets, including strategic decision making for the company.

IT Asset management software, on the other hand, is simply the systems in which all the IT hardware and software inventory of the organization is managed. As a hardware example, it contains hardware details such as how many laptops, how many monitors, printers etc. in the company, which serial number device was embezzled by which personnel, how many laptops will be depreciated at the end of this year. It even gives you the chance to see who has used the relevant devices before. Similarly, you can follow on premise servers.

In terms of software, you can manage the software, licenses, number of users and contracts owned by the institution.Although the features listed here seem very simple and easy to manage, it is almost impossible to follow them with excel in a fast IT operation. My personal experience is that companies that do not generally use this type of IT asset management software have to pay for the same/similar software licenses or hardware as turnover increases, or that some of their products cannot be used. The main reasons for this situation are;

• IT responsibles are not aware of the need for such software.

• Trying to manage this process with offline and error-prone lists like Excel

• Considering entering this data operationally as a waste of time or inability to spare time for this work due to insufficient resources

• No budget for ITAM software

Although there are not many examples in organizations, a special team is usually reserved for IT asset management in the global institutions I work as a part of. Limited resources can be used more optimally thanks to the software licensing and hardware centralization of the relevant teams. In addition, we can list many gains such as reducing the number of applications for similar purposes and purchasing on a larger scale.