How to Control and Manage the Life Cycle of Your Digital Assets?

It’s the era of innovations and technology. New business needs or efforts to streamline business processes bring about a certain tendency towards innovative solutions. Digital Transformation, for example, is quite a popular subject. Many businesses go into a transformation period to digitalize their business infrastructure. This is important and necessary because in the ever-digitalizing world today, progress is the key. And Digital Transformation literarily means progress.

Digital Transformation is popular, but it’s also something that should be carefully planned and monitored. SaaS solutions, for instance, joined the market along with Digital Transformation. Cloud Computing, to be exact. Relying on SaaS solutions is a reasonable thing to do, surely. But if not managed or monitored properly, a company might end up with a bloated and complex application inventory.

So, overall monitoring and managing of the digital assets are quite important to ensure a business with fluent processes. Controlling and managing the life cycles of the digital assets is a part of this comprehensive IT Asset Management process. A more general question, “How to Track Assets in a Digital World?” found answers. Take a look at the article to learn about tracking assets digitally.

What is an Asset Life Cycle?

Asset life cycle refers to a number of stages taking place during the period that the asset is put in use. An asset life cycle generally begins with the planning phase (for procurement) and ends with the disposal. An asset’s life cycle deals with the asset’s usage through time.

Asset life cycle management can be realized both for hardware and software. Some companies develop products and they follow the product’s life cycle from the very first phase of development, for example. Yet, the companies preferring to purchase software or hardware do not need to include the developmental stages of the product. It would help to have knowledge about the actual creation of the product but this is not something SaaS users, for example, necessarily seek.

Businesses may come up with different techniques and solutions in order to monitor their assets’ life cycles. But almost every company has a way to monitor their assets. Even though asset life cycle tracking is not a formalized process, it is widely preferred.

If an assets’ life cycle is not monitored, a company should face these problems:

Unexpected malfunctions and unplanned need for maintenance
Breakdowns
Long periods of low performance, inefficient business
Delayed business processes
Emergencies
Security risks

Employing asset life cycle techniques makes it possible to identify which asset is, in fact, more problematic and needs more maintenance. Then, companies should decide to retire such assets, depending on the situation.

What are the Stages of Asset Life Cycle Monitoring?

There are 4 focused periods in an asset’s life cycle:

Identify need/procure
Utilize
Maintain
Retire/dispose

But these are the conceptual terms that mark certain episodes during a life cycle. Businesses prefer a more detailed approach to monitor asset life cycles. For example, these steps could be included in the asset life cycle monitoring method of a business:

Identifying the need
Meeting with the provider and procuring
Deployment/set-up
Upgrades/downgrades
Malfunctions
Maintenance
Migration
Disposal/retirement

This way, analyzing how an asset functioned for the business is easier as there are more data about the performance of the asset.