4 Challenges for IT Asset Management and the Best Practices

Your IT infrastructure, comprising various hardware and software, is also referred to as assets. And how you handle it is imperative.

IT asset management (ITAM) can significantly impact your bottom line. Poor asset management results in budgetary problems, subpar performance, and upgrade delays. 

But managing IT assets isn’t easy, especially in today’s age when enterprises have distributed systems, multiple vendors, and an evergrowing inventory of devices.

This process encompasses the management of the entire lifecycle of any device or other digital asset. With hundreds of devices and tools in use, it’s understandable how things can quickly get complicated. 

In this article, we will outline the following:

• Some of the main challenges of ITAM.
• How to best tackle those challenges.
• How you can embrace convenience.

Of course, these things differ case by case, as each enterprise is different in size, niche, and business objectives. Taken together, however, the ITAM field is only projected to continue growing soon, signaling that it is an area organizations need to take seriously.

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Importance of Good IT Asset Management

Your infrastructure is only as good as the assets that make it. You lose productivity and revenue if you’re not getting the most out of them. 

Without proper ITAM, you don’t have visibility of your assets, creating several problems. 

For instance, you may spend more than you need for equipment you don’t necessarily need. It may be that your existing equipment can suffice and help achieve the same business goals, but you failed to utilize them because there was a lack of management. 

In addition to controlling IT expenditure, ITAM also helps streamline business processes and provide different departments or teams with resources in a timely fashion.

It also comes in handy in the case of incidents, as with effective ITAM, it’s easier to identify the assets impacted accurately. As a result, the benefit of ITAM extends to security and incident management. Even in the post-incident phase, ITAM can help analyze the impact and get to the root cause. 

Lastly, ITAM is also essential from a compliance perspective. Effective management of assets can help enterprises comply with internal security and privacy policies and implement external regulations. As a result, enterprises can minimize security and legal risks.

Top Challenges of IT Asset Management 

Here are the main challenges enterprises face when it comes to managing IT assets:

Lack of Visibility

The most common challenge is having full visibility over assets spread throughout the enterprise. This can be tricky even when using ITAM software, especially for enterprises with geographically spread locations or subsidiaries that may operate more independently. 

In big enterprises, tracking every asset and keeping an inventory itself can be expensive. Some enterprises may consider it an unnecessary expense. Visibility allows for more control and optimization. You don’t know what assets exist or where they are without visibility. 

Poor Budgeting

With poor ITAM comes budgetary overflows. 

Consider this a domino effect of lower visibility of assets. As you don’t know what exists and what doesn’t, you may procure assets that you don’t need or get more of them. Either way, your IT spending goes up, and money that you could have used for more essential things goes to equipment sitting in a warehouse. 

IT Support

The quality of IT support is directly linked with asset management. When employees start tickets, they often do so about an asset. With poor inventory management, those tickets can take longer to resolve as the support engineer identifies and locates the asset. 

As a result, productivity is lost, as the ticket may take longer to resolve. This particular challenge is relatively easy to deal with, as a bit of automation in asset tracking can speed up the process. 

Slow Adaptation to Change

One challenge that even enterprises with dedicated resources for ITAM need help with is adapting to change. Technology is evolving rapidly, and to keep up, companies often have to adopt new protocols, procure new devices, and buy software licenses. 

Managing all these changes in assets due to technological evolution can be difficult. They need an ITAM solution that moves with the technology change and simplifies the relationship between legacy and new systems. 

Best Practices for Your IT Assets

The first step for effective ITAM is to use a reliable tool dedicated to this purpose. However, simply using a tool isn’t enough; your approach needs to be more in-depth. 

Here are some of the best ITAM practices businesses should adopt:

• Dedicate personnel for ITAM: If you’re running an enterprise with 50 or more people, you should consider dedicating an employee exclusively to ITAM. 
  
  
• Take a lifecycle approach: Base your ITAM strategy on the asset's lifecycle, beginning from planning to procurement to maintenance to decommissioning. Your inventory should reflect the stage of the lifecycle for all assets. 

• Integrate ITAM software with other tools: On its own, your ITAM software and all the data it collects are limited in their abilities, but when combined with other tools, it can open new doors for optimization and innovation. 
  
  
• Manage licenses with ITAM software: Software licensing can be costly, and as software is an asset, you should manage its license with the ITAM tool. That way, you can manage costs better. 
  
  
• Conduct internal asset audit: Annually or semi-annually, conduct audits of your asset inventory to identify and rectify errors. 
  
  
• Analyze reports: Your ITAM tool would most like to be equipped with analytical capabilities to analyze all the data it collects. Use that to your advantage to reduce your IT spending and prioritize the assets for fixes and upgrades that are more critical. It may also help identify more reliable vendors and cause fewer problems/failures. 
  
  
• Use ITAM for timely maintenance: Your ITAM software can also be used to maintain the equipment, from extending service agreements to upgrading to newer models.
  
  
• Define clear ITAM policy: Enterprises should define a policy for ITAM that is in line with other enterprise-wide policies, such as security policy. A clearly defined policy will streamline processes and minimize errors. 
  
  
• Use ITAM to reduce carbon footprint: ITAM also provides an opportunity for enterprises to reduce waste by extending the life of their assets and safely disposing of legacy equipment safely by selling them or recycling them. 
  
  
• Gather feedback: Learn more about your asset management by gathering feedback from stakeholders, such as procurers, support engineers, and end users. This will help you improve processes and learn the pain points of those who actually use your IT assets. 

Embrace Convenience With OneHub 

ITAM is highly contingent on the software you use, and if you’re looking for an easy way to manage your assets, OneHub may just be the answer. 

OneHub is the proprietary dashboard for OneCall, PivIT’s exceptional IT maintenance service that lets you manage assets for free.

It’s designed to integrate with virtually any asset and vendor, making it easier for you to bring all your assets in one place for more visibility. From renewing software licenses to detecting spare hardware locations, this convenient dashboard is your key to successful ITAM. 

You can easily combine maintenance contracts (both OneCall and outside that, for example, OEMs) on OneHub. This removes confusion, reduces redundancy, and increases efficiency. 

It’s the perfect solution for those enterprises with a limited budget for ITAM while still realizing its importance. As we’ve outlined, this is not an area to neglect — and OneCall is here to help.