It’s common for businesses to wonder about how they can improve their asset management strategies. There are several IT asset management best practices to consider that’ll set you up for success if you’re just getting started. We’ll provide you with a full breakdown of IT asset management (ITAM) best practices in this article. Stick around to get all the details.
What Are the 5 IT Asset Management Processes?
Before we get into best practices, let’s take a quick look at the typical IT asset management process. You’ll usually see assets managed throughout their lifecycle in five primary steps, which are:
- Creating and updating an inventory of all assets on hand.
- Purchasing new assets based on business needs and budgets while negotiating with vendors for the best prices.
- Setting up new assets and ensuring they operate at full functionality to keep business functions running smoothly.
- Continually auditing and maintaining assets to identify any issues and help the business operate at full capacity.
- Dispose of, recycle, or sell old assets for the best possible price once they no longer have a use in the business.
When following these five steps, you can always ensure that business processes improve and continue moving forward to achieve the greatest success.
What Are the Best Practices Followed by Asset Management?
Now that you know the basic process of asset management, let’s take a look at IT asset management best practices. The ITIL is an organization that provides core guidelines to help run ITAM processes successfully, so following the best practices they provide is an excellent idea. The ITIL best practices include:
- Assign IT asset management roles and responsibilities: An essential thing organizations should do is designate roles for their IT team to help manage assets. It’s a good idea to have an ITAM specialist or manager in charge, technicians for maintenance, and employees who can manage inventory data.
- Conduct self-audits regularly: ITAM practices should involve self-audits to ensure all information is being recorded and aspects like IT equipment recycling are being performed in accordance with regulations.
- Use multiple forms of discovery: When creating an inventory, it can be easy to have some assets go uncounted. After all, most businesses use tons of different pieces of computer equipment throughout their operations. Using multiple discovery systems ensures all your bases are covered.
- Define important metrics: Every business is different, so you should define metrics for ITAM that are most important to your needs. Some examples could be performance metrics for equipment like download speeds and load times, cost per year of an asset’s typical lifecycle, or cost of workstations.
There are several steps and processes involved in each of the best practices of ITAM. If you’re unsure of where to start in managing it all, teams like Multiply can help. When you partner with Multiply, we can help with all these aspects and more, such as deploying accurate discovery systems, performing audits, and helping you pick the most important metrics to track.
What Are the 4 Principles of Asset Management?
Along with ITAM best practices, there are also some principles of asset management that are important to consider when creating a successful system. The four primary principles are:
- IT assets exist to provide value: Your IT equipment is part of your business and something you invest in to provide value. That’s why having an optimized management system is important to ensure equipment fills its role in the organization.
- Align assets with financial and business goals: The investments you make in IT equipment should be carefully planned to help you achieve your primary business objectives.
- Designate leadership: IT asset management does require leadership to ensure all processes operate smoothly. Partners like Multiply can help if you’re struggling to get the functions of ITAM up and running.
- Assurance of functionality: ITAM should ensure that assets are functioning well so they can provide value to the business. Maintaining functionality involves routine maintenance and managing the entire lifecycle.
From these four principles, you should be able to see that asset management plays a big role in an organization. It can be a key part of helping you achieve your other objectives.
What Are 3 Methods That Are Used to Manage Asset Management?
When setting up an ITAM system, you’ll also want to consider the methods used for organizing it. Three common methods deployed in ITAM systems are:
- Manual tracking: A manual tracking system involves creating IT asset inventories using programs like Excel spreadsheets where someone would manually input the data. This can be a good cheap option for smaller businesses.
- Software and digital storage: ITAM software is available to track information about assets, and some systems even provide digital storage for software assets. However, some types of software can be harder to deploy for those with less experience, so choosing the right types of software is a must.
- Physical storage systems and ITAM tools: If you have a lot of hardware, like personal computers and hard drives, physical storage systems will be a must to keep it organized. ITAM tools can be deployed to make this process easier, such as barcode scanning systems that easily track all your assets during the process.
Many businesses will benefit from starting with hardware asset management since computer hardware runs lots of primary business functions. If you need help getting started managing hardware, Multiply is the team for the job. We can help with asset discovery and creating physical storage systems for success.
What Are the 3 Main Deliverables of IT Asset Management?
Everything that goes into asset management is for a purpose because it benefits businesses in several ways. The three main deliverables of ITAM are:
- Get the most value from assets by optimizing their functionality, lifecycle, and uses.
- Create an organized system that eliminates struggles and hectic situations that occur with computer equipment.
- Facilitate communication and collaboration between all teams involved to provide a better working environment.
If you want assistance achieving these deliverables or implementing the best practices of ITAM, Multiply is here for all your needs.
How Multiply Can Help
Multiply is a team of IT consultants and senior service technicians. We partner with companies to help implement streamlined asset management systems that are easier to manage. When you have us as a partner, we’ll be there to guide you each step of the way, which takes a lot of stress off of all team members involved.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help!
