Best Practices For IT Asset Management
A wide range of IT systems and assets can make it difficult to track each resource's use, cost, and performance. A strong ITAM strategy will help you oversee and optimize these resources.
A comprehensive ITAM strategy requires a complete IT inventory. This should incorporate data centers, software, hardware, mobile assets, and so on. Sarah. K.White writes for CIO dive about the best practices to be followed while planning for ITAM.
Here is what she has written
IAITAM is the only organization that offers ITAM specific documentation to help guide organizations through asset management. Their Best Practice Library (IBPL) has 12 key areas for ITAM that include:
Program process: Through centralizing IT asset management throughout all phases of the life cycle, organizations can build a continual program to support all relevant IT activity in the organization
Program management: ITAM programs can be organized by following the IAITAM Best Practice BluePrint set out by IT Asset and Management professionals. These set out how to establish an ITAM strategy.
Communication and education management: ITAM policies need to be a core value of any organization, and this is why it's worth the time and effort to educate and train your employees. This also helps you plan for any necessary change management that will need to take place.
Project management: Strong project management is essential when implementing ITAM. It helps to organize, organize, and maintain IT assets and identify the resources you need to do this.
Documentation management: It's vital to maintain documentation of your assets. This includes making sure there are records of any purchases, licenses, certificates of authenticity.
Financial management: Financial IT asset management is the backbone to savings within your ITAM program. It's imperative to stay focused on budgeting, fixed asset reconciliation, chargeback, invoice reconciliation, forecasting, and financial audit preparations.
Compliance and legislation: It is important to be risk-avoidant and always prepared to fix any noncompliance issues. Paired with this mindset, an organization should employ ITAM strategies to manage compliance proactively.
Vendor management: Effective ITAM is crucial for ensuring that your company stays updated with third-party vendors. Establishing a documented communication protocol and building a library of interactions will help you in this process.
Acquisition management: It's always best to take time to plan and research before you invest in your IT assets. Taking a minute to map out what your organization needs from this point will save you time and money in the long run.
Asset identification: To successfully manage any IT assets, it needs to be identified and located first. One way to do this is by placing it into an asset management system that quickly finds all of the owned IT assets.
Disposal management: Eventually, most IT assets will become redundant, outdated, or broken. Your organization should be prepared for this eventuality and decide on a strategy to dispose of these discarded assets.
What We Think
It’s important to get ITAM right for your organization as it helps to make decisions to optimize and maximize ROI from every asset throughout its lifecycle. However, as organizations use a larger number of assets, keeping track of them manually is very tedious and time-consuming. Furthermore, due to the complex and dynamic nature of assets, there are high chances of discrepancies in manual processes of assets management.
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