How Does IT Asset Management Benefits Making a Strategic Investment?

Establishing a business is hard. But making the correct decisions after having founded a business is harder. A business should always monitor the market and identify which business processes it should improve. These improvements are done through investments. Yet, choosing the correct product, process, personnel, or hardware etc. to invest in is a very critical action. The wrong set of moves towards investment could affect the business negatively, either by arising malfunctions or by ending up with negative or low RTO (Return of Investment). These problems could mean a bottleneck for the business.

In this article, the concept of Strategic Investment and the question of how to make a Strategic Investment will be covered.

What is Strategic Investment?

Making an investment is putting money into a certain decision by purchasing the necessary assets. Strategic Investment, a bit more specific, is making these financial efforts (as individuals or as a company) specifically intending to make a steady profit after executing the decision after careful consideration and planning. There are consulting companies specified in almost every line of business to help companies make such educated, well-thought business decisions.

Strategic Investment is not only about finance, but also about the sector of a company and its aims. So, in order to make a Strategic Investment, gaining insight into the business is a must. The same decision or purchase can be made in two different sectors and wind up completely different. One could bring about so much revenue while the other might end up as a complete failure, for example. There are several pivots that affect the quality and profitability of a Strategic Investment:

• Understanding the market
• Getting insight into the company
• Identifying the true needs of the customer
• Designing a well-thought roadmap
• Evaluating the inventories (personnel, software, hardware, etc.)

All in all, there are 2 general points while preparing for a Strategic Investment:

1. Understanding the market: Digital Transformation and Digital Acceleration are 2 popular subjects that should be of importance before a Strategic Investment as this is the meta for the market today. Learn more about Digital Acceleration by reading the article.
2. Understanding the company: A company should know its turf like the back of its hand. This can be realized through efficient IT Asset Management.

Then, everything would fall into places.

How IT Asset Management Helps Making a Strategic Decision?

IT Asset Management, abbreviated and also known as ITAM, is a framework for IT departments’ governance of the IT structure in a business. IT Asset Management is a methodical and comprehensive type of IT management. It deals with all the components of IT: physical (hardware), financial (IT costs), digital (software), licenses & warranties (documents), etc. IT Asset Management monitors the lifecycles of all these belongings. So, a more visible IT landscape can be formed thanks to efficient IT Asset Management. It’s the foremost aim of this framework. This way, optimization of several business processes can be done and maximization of efficiency and performance can be realized. IT Asset Management is a robust process that adds value to a company by providing insight into IT.

IT Asset Management systematically handles the lifecycles of all the assets related to IT. For example, the lifecycles of assets could involve the steps as follows:

• Procurement
• Deployment/set-up
• Maintenance
• Upgrades/downgrades
• Migration
• Integration
• Retirement

For more information about how IT Asset Management makes the processes more systematic, please visit the article.

Considering the characteristics of IT Asset Management, a Strategic Decision process could really benefit from the visibility ITAM provides. Visualized reports, infographics, analyses etc. all constitute a critical body of dataset that functions as insight into the IT landscape. This results in understanding the company and identifying the more urgent needs or opportunities within a business.