IT Asset Management Best Practices

Quick Answer: IT asset management (ITAM) means tracking and managing your organization's technology, from laptops to software licenses, across the full asset lifecycle. Best practices include building a clear ITAM strategy, tagging and naming assets, automating workflows, and auditing regularly. The right ITAM software gives you real-time visibility, reduces costs, and keeps your team productive.

As more teams work remotely or in hybrid setups, IT assets like laptops, monitors, and other hardware move around constantly. To keep everything running and avoid disruptions, you need a reliable way to track and manage those assets. That's where IT asset management comes in.

Here's a look at what IT asset management is, why it matters, and the best practices to follow when managing your technology assets.

What is IT Asset Management?

IT asset management (ITAM) is the practice of managing your organization’s technology assets throughout their lifecycles, from acquisition to disposal. An IT asset can be physical (e.g., servers, desktop computers and laptops, keyboards, monitors, and other hardware) or digital (e.g., software licenses, licensing agreements for public and private clouds, etc.). The goal of ITAM is to gain visibility and control over your entire asset inventory so you can run your business more efficiently, get the most out of your assets, and lower your total cost of ownership.

A comprehensive ITAM strategy, backed by the right software, allows you to track the status, location, and utilization of your assets in real time. When you can accurately audit and report on your IT inventory, you can optimize device deployment, anticipate upcoming warranty expirations, and forecast future purchasing needs. 

8 Benefits of IT Asset Management

A strong ITAM program delivers both operational and financial benefits. Here are 8 of the most common ones.

1. Streamlined asset management: With comprehensive IT asset management software, you’ll have clear processes to upload assets, assign them to employees, send things for repair, and much more. These streamlined asset management workflows will significantly reduce manual effort and decrease the risk of errors or siloed information.
2. Improved operational efficiency: By streamlining your asset management processes, your team will also save lots of time and resources as opposed to manually tracking IT assets. This gives everyone time back to work on other projects that are important to the business and ultimately boosts operational efficiency.
3. Visibility into the entire lifecycle of your assets: With all your asset data in one centralized platform, you’ll have access to the full lifecycle history of your IT devices. Now, you can see who a device has been assigned to over its life, how many times it’s been repaired, if there’s a remaining warranty on it, and any other relevant data points you’re tracking.
4. Optimized device and asset utilization: When you have visibility and control over the full lifecycle of your IT hardware, you can easily optimize its utilization. Optimizing asset utilization ensures your devices are being used to their best ability and that your employees have the right tools to perform their jobs effectively.
5. Better forecasting and budgeting: By enhancing asset usage and understanding the full device lifecycle, you can better plan for future purchasing needs. You’ll not only be able to forecast when devices are due for replacement but also provide accurate data to support this need and secure the necessary budget.
6. Enhanced accountability: IT asset management allows you to keep tabs on where a device is and who it’s assigned to at any given time. This way, if an item is unexpectedly found damaged, lost, or stolen, you can hold the right person accountable.
7. Improved warranty and contract management: With robust individual asset records, you can store warranty and service contract information for every last IT asset. Keeping track of these can help you forecast when an item might need a replacement or a service contract renewal.
8. Increased security and compliance: By knowing exactly which assets are (and aren’t) part of your network through auto-discovery, you can identify any rogue devices or other threats to increase security. With accurate, real-time data on your IT asset inventory, you can ensure that you’ll remain compliant with state or federal regulations or funding requirements.

Risks You May Face Without IT Asset Management

Lack of visibility into your assets

Without real-time visibility into your asset inventory, you may not have the correct information on a device’s status, condition, or whereabouts. A lack of accurate information could cause you to assign a device to one employee when it’s already checked out to another. And without proper asset control, you’ll be unable to hold someone accountable for damaged, lost, or stolen devices.

Decreased productivity

When you don’t have the right tools to manage an essential part of your workforce – your IT assets – your team can’t work as productively as possible. They may be using old or damaged devices because the full asset lifecycle isn’t being tracked, and they can’t easily request repairs in one centralized place. Without the best devices available, your team won’t be able to work as quickly or efficiently, causing you to lose a competitive advantage in the market.

Potential business disruptions

Lack of insight into your IT assets not only hurts your team’s productivity but can also lead to business disruptions. Whether a device gets lost or needs an unexpected replacement, that team member won’t be able to perform their job duties for the time being, and you’ll need to make an unforeseen purchase to get them up and running again.

Inability to report on and audit your asset estate

To understand what’s happening with your IT asset estate at any given time, you need to be able to pull real-time reports. When the leadership team or finance department requests IT asset reports or audits, you’ll have to do a lot of last-minute manual work to make that happen without the data readily available.

Inability to forecast future purchasing needs

Without accurate data on the full lifecycle of your IT assets, you’ll also struggle to accurately forecast and budget for future device purchases. This could land you in several unfavorable situations, from having too little to having a surplus of assets, not getting enough budget for the device models your team needs to perform their best, and so on.

What to Consider When Selecting the Right IT Asset Management Platform

To avoid all of the above risks, you need a proper IT asset management solution that provides real-time visibility into your assets along with full historical records. Here are factors to consider when selecting the right IT asset management platform for your organization:

• Customizability: Your chosen software should be easily customizable to match your unique naming conventions, use cases, and workflows. You should also ensure an IT asset management platform allows for customizable alerts and notifications, so you’re aware of any changes made in real time.
• Ease of use: The right solution should also be user-friendly and easy to navigate so your team can get up to speed quickly.
• AI Features: Look for a platform that includes time-saving AI features.
• Scalability: Whether you have other departments looking to track assets or your business is growing, you want to choose IT asset management software that can scale with you.
• Integrations: To create one centralized place for your asset data, you want a platform that integrates into your existing tech stack. Look for solutions that offer integrations with help desks, ERPs, financial management systems, directories, and device managers.
• Audits and reporting: Your chosen software should provide robust reporting and audit capabilities. Look for a platform with customizable visual dashboards that allow you and your stakeholders to easily analyze asset data.
• Mobile app: To simplify your audits, consider an IT asset management solution with a mobile auditing app and built-in barcode scanning technology. Mobile access will help you streamline your audit process so your team can conduct audits more frequently, ensuring more accurate data.
• Security: A platform’s security features are perhaps the most important factors to consider before signing on. Ask whether the software is cloud-based or on-premise, if it has security certifications like SOC 2, and if it offers features like robust user permissions, single sign-on, and SFTP.
• Implementation and support: In order to use your new software solution effectively, you need proper training and support. Ensure that your IT asset management provider offers onboarding and ongoing customer support.
• Customer testimonials: Of course, don’t forget to review various forms of social proof, like case studies and third-party review sites, to get honest feedback from real customers.

Best Practices for Effectively Managing Your IT Assets

Once you've chosen the right software for your organization, you’re ready to put your IT asset management program into action. Let’s look at some best practices to help you effectively manage your IT assets. 

Create a clear ITAM strategy

As with any business plan, you must first build a framework to properly upload and manage your IT assets in your chosen software. Start by creating a list of IT asset management goals specific to your organization. The main objectives of IT asset management are to track your assets and boost your organization’s efficiency, both of which you can’t do without a plan.

Define what you consider an IT asset and want to include in your inventory

As we mentioned at the start of this article, many items can be considered IT assets across your hardware and software. Before you even begin to inventory your IT assets, it is essential to define what will count as an individual asset versus what might be part of a kit. Kitting smaller items like headphones, keyboards, and mice can help streamline asset deployment processes.

When taking stock of your IT inventory, you can easily see the assets that are on and off your network through auto-discovery. Auto-discovery helps you get real-time data on the devices currently accessing your network so you can easily account for any discrepancies. These discrepancies can show you 1. if any items may have been lost or stolen and 2. the number of off-network devices you have, indicating a surplus and helping you better plan for future IT asset purchases.

Name and tag your IT assets accordingly

Once you’ve decided which items are part of your IT asset estate, you must ensure that each asset has its own unique ID. This will make it easy to upload the assets into your software, so you know what is what. Ideally, you should also tag each asset with its own barcode label so you can more easily deploy and audit them in the future.

If you’re unsure where to start, take a look at some common IT asset tagging best practices.

Use a lifecycle-based approach to ITAM

After your assets each have their own unique IDs and/or barcodes, you’re ready to set clear processes for your IT asset management program. These processes should cover the entire lifecycle of your assets and go beyond simply registering and tracking IT assets. When outlining your strategies, consider each of the following stages:

• Procurement: Budgeting for and purchasing your assets
• Asset identification and registration: Capturing asset details like type, serial number, specifications, purchase date, warranty, etc.
• Deployment: Distributing IT assets to their intended users or departments (this can include asset tagging, assignment, configuration, installation, etc.)
• Asset tracking and monitoring: Routinely reporting on the status of your assets and conducting audits to ensure data remains accurate
• Maintenance and support: Proactively tracking maintenance and repair needs as well as warranty and support service contract expirations
• Asset retirement and disposal (ITAD): Retiring assets at the end of their life and recycling or disposing of them properly
• Refreshing and replacement: Replacing IT assets that have been disposed of or are no longer meeting the organization’s needs in terms of cost-effectiveness and technological advancements

Get your entire team on the same page

Once you’ve created your ITAM strategy and processes, it’s time to put your plan into action and begin the implementation phase. Include all your potential end-users in the onboarding process to ensure your entire team is on the same page. They should be well-versed in both the platform’s UI and the processes that you laid out in your ITAM strategy.

Of course, make sure the plan and processes are easily accessible to everyone at all times. Proper onboarding and documentation will help you achieve higher adoption rates and, in turn, run an effective ITAM program.

Assign the right permissions to the right users

While you want your entire team to be up to speed on your new IT asset management processes, not every single person needs to have admin-level access. You might have Power Users who can approve asset reservations and edit report fields, whereas your standard Users may have view-only access to assets and reports. Managing access helps you reduce the chance of human error and increases the security of your program.

Automate your ITAM workflows and reports wherever possible

With your IT asset management program up and running, you’ll quickly see an increase in efficiency and time savings. However, there could be even more opportunities to save time and resources when you automate your ITAM workflows and reports. Some examples of automations can include:

• Setting a status to automatically update when an action is performed (e.g., a laptop’s status changes to “Assigned to Employee” when it is checked out)
• Automatically syncing data to and from integrated applications for real-time data consistency (e.g., asset discovery, help desks, device managers, and more)
• Generating automatic reports at a set day and time so you can regularly review your IT asset estate metrics

Regularly conduct audits of your IT asset inventory

While you should ideally keep up with the status of your IT asset estate through automated reports and real-time visual dashboards, it is paramount to know the condition of your assets as well. Whether it be monthly or quarterly, be sure to conduct regularly scheduled audits of your IT assets so you can maintain accurate data. Audits help you track the condition and location of your assets and hold team members accountable if items are lost, damaged, or stolen.

Track device warranties and other support service contracts

When managing your IT assets in one centralized place, you don’t simply want to track an item’s ID number and location. You want to track its entire asset history, including warranty information, repair history, and any associated support service contracts.

This will not only help your end-users see if an item can be repaired through a warranty or third-party service but can also inform management of whether an asset needs a support contract renewed or will need to be replaced altogether.

How to Get Started with IT Asset Management

Building an effective IT asset management program doesn’t happen overnight. But when you take the time to create a thoughtful strategy and invest in the right software for your needs, your team will boost efficiency and, ultimately, save time and money.

To learn even more about building your ITAM program, check out these resources:

• The Best IT Asset Management Software 
• Software Asset Management Best Practices 

If you’re ready to put your ITAM plans into motion, Asset Panda can help. Request your demo today to see our IT asset management platform in action.