How Should Companies Manage Applications and Software?

The volume of Digital Transformation today brings about growing applications portfolios for businesses. Companies try to adapt to the new digital business environment and they procure modern business solutions that answer to the arising needs. Such a rapid business flow, if not monitored properly, might lead to bulky portfolios or inventories and complex enterprise architecture altogether. If the different business processes conducted in a company is not integrated or managed well, business delays and/or malfunctions might happen. Or, for the worse, a business might completely lose track during the Digital Transformation process they go through and all the investments result in failure. See the article on How to Avoid Digital Transformation Failure. Lest such outcomes might realize, businesses should have a visible and traceable IT landscape.

So, the current business trends call for a comprehensive solution that ensures control and visibility for the IT landscape in a business. The IT assets of a company are the elements that get the job done, today. While non-digital solutions could still work back in the day, modern business requires a whole different set of thinking and more digital procedures. Thus, managing the IT assets is the key factor for attaining and maintaining a valuable business.

IT Asset Management is the framework to structure such a business environment.

What is IT Asset Management?

ITAM, short for IT Asset Management, is the comprehensive methodology to monitor, maintain, and evaluate all the IT belongings of a company. It is like a data governing process, but it deals with the complete set of IT assets rather than solely focusing on data. IT Asset Management is an umbrella term that functions thanks to its asset-specific components.

• Application Portfolio Management (APM)
• Software Asset Management (SAM)
• Hardware Asset Management (HAM)
• IT Cost Management
• IT Integration Management

These are some of the subgenres of IT Asset Management. But IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is an approach that constantly produces new techniques that reach different sides of IT Asset Management. So, it’s only natural that IT Asset Management keeps evolving. Disposable Applications, for example, is a new topic that will most probably require IT Asset Management to come up with new solutions. Find out more about the tech trends that have the potential to change the game by taking a look at “Gartner’s 2022 Tech Trends Basics: What’s Next in Tech?”.

So, IT Asset Management is a modern approach towards governing the overall IT landscape of a business in a systematic way.

How Should Companies Manage Applications and Software?

Managing a business is an action that requires making strategic business decisions. To be able to make such decisions and guide a business to success, insight into the company and into the business tools in use is necessary. So, a comprehensive and systematic approach is the key.

Here are several important factors regarding efficient application and software management:

• Systematicity: Managing IT assets is not a part-time job. It requires constant monitoring and ordinary check-ups for the quality and up-to-dateness of portfolios.
• Visibility & traceability: The IT structure of a company consists of many different applications that all carry various features with changing sizes. Mapping out all these elements and creating topologies brings about visibility and traceability for the landscape. IT Asset Management, therefore, simplifies the IT structure for the better.
• Creating insight for strategic business decisions: A strategic decision cannot be made unless data regarding the decision is clearly understood. Yet, providing such data is not always easy in a complex and untraceable IT landscape. Visualized reports, topologies, categories, efficiency evaluations are some of the beneficial types of data that facilitate the critical job of decision-makers.
• A visionary mindset toward the future: IT assets will change over time and new types will surely enter the market. So, maintaining an intact IT Asset Management can be only be done through contemplating the future.

Having considered all these, it would be safe to say that the correct and efficient way to manage IT assets is simply employing what the IT Asset Management framework has to offer. There is various software tailored for IT Asset Management needs. Loggle, for example, is an IT Asset Management software that has 4 modules to answer to modern needs of businesses: Application Portfolio Management, Hardware Asset Management, Integration Management, and IT Cost Management. Pretty much all the critical points that were covered in this article.

Feel free to read more into 5 Ways Loggle Will Help Optimize How Your Business Uses IT and get in touch with us!