What are the Challenges for IT Asset Management?

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a methodology employed by almost all businesses in different ways today. It helps businesses create more added value by ensuring a more visible IT structure, thus facilitating the control over IT assets utilized by different departments.

However, there might be obstacles and challenges before employing ITAM or during its execution. Let’s dwell on ITAM and the reasons that might make ITAM harder than it should be.

What is IT Asset Management?

IT Asset Management, ITAM in short, is the comprehensive approach towards governing all the belongings in relation to the IT structure in a business. Application Portfolio Management (APM), Software Asset Management (SAM), Hardware Asset Management (HAM) are all subgenres of IT Asset Management. As the umbrella term, ITAM tries to methodically answer all the needs of an IT department related to governing contents in the landscape.

IT Asset Management aims to account for each unique part that constitutes the overall IT functionality of a business. Today, the IT structure of a company can be addressed as the “backbone” of the business considering how digital transformation is important. The general tendency (obligation, even) is to digitalize as many business processes as possible in order to save time and effort. IT Asset Management facilitates this transformation along with providing data for corporate decisions regarding Business Strategy Alignment. Feel free to learn more about Business Strategy Alignment in the article.

Yet, shaping the whole IT environment of a business is not always an easy job. Especially for big-sized companies that create a substantial amount of revenue, continuity of the business processes is of utmost importance. So, employing end-to-end IT Asset Management may come with problems as every business may have its own practices.

What are the Challenges for IT Asset Management?

Although they may differ and/or multiply for different lines of businesses and companies, there are several challenges that ITAM executioners face.

• Distributed Management
• Lack of Order
• Lack of Process Controls

Distributed Management

Once businesses procure IT materials, they have the tendency to govern in a distributed manner, either by singling out or by recording them somewhere only to lose track. This generally results in a noteworthy reduction of the visibility that affects IT structure overall. As bits and pieces, the data is almost always quite difficult to keep updated. Even accessing the data gets harder. This creates compliance issues and several other problems for audits. Plus, such a distributed management over the IT landscape diminishes a coherent understanding of asset ownership and might lead to the illusion that assets belong to the personnel and not to the company.

Lack of Order

Similar to dispersed management, one another challenge regarding ITAM is that they do not have a single source of truth. That is an intact inventory. Without an asset inventory, businesses cannot see what software they bought and currently using, what licenses that require actions, etc. It’s because there would not be any information about it, at all. Thus, creating an inventory over the IT assets could seem hard at first. But in the long run, it certainly changes the game.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) tackles this problem. Find out more about Enterprise Asset Management by taking a look at the article.

Lack of Process Controls

Some companies may start employing ITAM just for a short period of time. Once the audit date gets closer, for example. After that, these companies might put ITAM completely aside or neglect it slowly. Going back to their old habits, in other words. This only saves the day. It doesn’t create meaningful value for the business.

So, employing ITAM as a company culture should be the aim. This way, the scary dates of the audit do not arouse all around panic.

IT Asset Management Software

IT Asset Management software is a digital solution developed for businesses to manage all their IT assets (software, hardware, integration, system) throughout their lifecycle from a single platform. Loggle is a startup offering IT Asset Management solutions. You can contact us to learn how to manage your IT assets with Loggle.