What Does Hardware Asset Manager Do?

Hardware assets are quite important for a business. Without the hardware, businesses processes get hindered and the overall performance of a company goes down to the ground. So, selecting the correct hardware and maintaining them by updates, repairs, ordinary check-ups are necessary for a flawless business.

Companies allocate time and effort to provide maintenance for the hardware. Hardware Asset Manager is the main responsible for this process in a company.

What is Hardware Asset Management?

Hardware Asset Management, HAM in short, is the framework for monitoring, managing, and evaluating the hardware a business owns. Hardware Asset Management refers to accounting for every piece of the physical asset in the IT landscape of a business. Phones, printers, monitors, keyboards, earplugs, servers, data centre machines... and much more hardware can be counted as the focal point of Hardware Asset Management. Types of these assets might differ from sector to sector, but the comprehensive notion of Hardware Asset Management deals with them all regardless of the sector, business, or department.

Thanks to HAM, an overview of the physical IT assets can be reported. This way, monitoring, maintaining, and checking the efficiency of the assets become easier and decisions can be taken accordingly. For example, when planning the budget for the next year, allocation of the budget can be decided considering which hardware is needed more in the company.

Hardware Asset Management plays a critical role in IT Asset Management and should always be aligned with the general organizational schema and aims of other ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) practises like Software Asset Management, Application Portfolio Management etc.

Find out more about Hardware Asset Management by clicking this article.

What are the responsibilities of a Hardware Asset Manager?

As Hardware Asset Management is a process under the umbrella term IT Asset Management, the responsibilities of the IT Asset Manager and Hardwar Asset Manager resemble each other. Yet, one could say that the role of the Hardware Asset Manager is way more focused on a specific type of IT asset: the hardware. Classifying the IT assets makes the whole IT asset management process easier as the responsible people are devoted to a single type of asset.

As always, the roles of the Hardware Asset Manager and the scope of the process might differ from sector to sector. But there are some responsibilities almost always shared by all the businesses.

So, here is a couple of responsibilities a Hardware Asset Manager has.

1. Set the policy towards the hardware: Hardware Asset Management could be company culture and the Hardware Asset Manager should ensure that the personnel know about this concept and Hardware Asset Management’s benefits. By doing so, a collaborative process would start.
2. Coordinate the whole process: Hardware Asset Manager should orchestrate the Hardware Asset Management framework in a company. They should adapt the principles of the methodical process into the company considering the company’s and people’s needs.
3. Identify and assess the risks: Once hardware inventory is structured, the Hardware Asset Manager should evaluate which hardware might face malfunctions. This can also be called Risk Management. Learn more about Risk Management here.
4. Facilitate repairs and updates: Upon understanding the hardware environment, methods for optimization should be addressed. The Hardware Asset Manager should ask this question: “what to do for the next step”.
5. Match people with assets: Pairing up the personnel with the hardware makes the whole process more visible and easier to keep track of.

How Does Hardware Asset Management Software Help Hardware Asset Manager?

Once the process of Hardware Asset Management is digitalized, the Hardware Asset Manager won’t have to be wasting effort by spreadsheet silos. A digitalized hardware inventory provides a single source of truth that is always up-to-date.

The benefits of a Hardware Asset Management software could be addressed as follows.

1. Less manual work, more efficiency: Assigning personnel to manually create a hardware inventory requires personnel to put so much effort into a task that is hard to keep updated. Hardware Asset Management software, on the other hand, gets rid of this manual labour and makes the process more efficient.
2. Visibility and traceability: The personnel might change their hardware quite often – new monitor, new phone when necessary etc. Keeping up with this high-speed traffic requires a digitalized asset management framework.
3. Budget optimization: Once hardware inventory is digitalized, it’s easier to single out which spending should be retired. This way, more proper budget planning can be done.

The benefits of Hardware Asset Management software are much more than the first ones that come to mind. Feel free to read about Hardware Asset Management software here.