What is IT Asset Life Cycle Management?

Managing IT assets from the moment they are purchased to the time they are disposed of is a delicate task. If you want to optimize the ROI of your IT Assets, you need to view them from a holistic perspective and manage them throughout their lifecycle. This is where IT asset lifecycle management comes into play. IT Asset lifecycle management helps optimize the profit your IT assets generate throughout their lifecycle.

What is IT Asset Life Cycle Management?

IT Asset lifecycle management is software that aims to maximize the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of all software and hardware elements in the business environment throughout their lifecycle.

IT Asset management is a critical action for any organization, with implications for employee productivity, financial health, and overall safety. Good asset management allows you to anticipate your company's needs, make informed purchasing decisions, be proactive in replenishing resources, and know the total cost of ownership of an asset. For efficient IT asset management, you need to know the basic process, which is the life cycle of IT asset management.

What are the Stages of IT Asset Life Cycle Management?

The lifecycle of an IT asset includes a series of stages in the simple term, such as acquiring an asset from its establishment, operating and maintaining it until disposal.

Procurement

Procurement, selection of vendors, the establishment of payment terms, choice of strategy, negotiation, etc. It involves purchasing the asset to meet both the company's requirements and the budget based on the decision made in the planning situation. Various options must be researched, pricing compared, trials or demos tried before the IT asset is purchased.

The following processes are involved in the procurement phase:

• sourcing activities
• Create a purchase order
• Start predetermined purchase order workflow
• Associate with the cost center for budgets
• Creating and managing transfer orders
• Purchasing assets
• Adding purchased assets to IT inventory

Deployment

Capturing the hardware asset as a configuration item by pre-checking the asset for physical defects, engineering issues, design issues, and assessing whether the IT asset is properly and securely installed before shipping and assigning the IT asset. This step is then used to meet the requirements for which the asset was purchased.

The following processes are involved in the distribution phase:

• Deploy assets, change availability from stock
• Assigning software to hardware asset
• Mapping relationships
• Configure, load and integrate assets into the live environment

Maintenance

Not all pieces of equipment in the business are of equal importance and not all require the same degree of maintenance. For these reasons, the primary purpose when using an IT asset is to maximize the IT asset's efficiency. That's why an IT asset is constantly monitored for problems that may occur due to its continued use, such as wear and tear. Maintenance is the process and continuous process of increasing the availability, safety, reliability and quality of your IT assets.

The following processes are involved in the maintenance phase:

• Schedule scans
• Get audit history and get full ownership tracking
• Software compatibility
• Calculating asset depreciation
• Determine the total cost of ownership of the asset

Support

Maintenance and support help prolong the productive life of an IT asset as it ages. Support is the stage where changes and updates are made to keep the asset up to date.

The support phase includes the following actions:

• Preserve contracts for assets
• Notify technicians of expiration dates
• Identifying impact via dependency mapping in CMDB
• Software license agreements and management

Retirement & Disposal

Before an asset is disposed of at the end of its useful and productive life, relationships are reviewed and processed in a way that does not affect the organization or environment. Business-critical information about the IT asset is removed. The asset is then disassembled piece by piece, and the reusable parts are preserved. If the IT asset contains any component that may pose an environmental threat, it is classified as a hazard and eliminated.

The following processes are involved in the disposal phase:

• Change the asset's use status to expired/discarded
• De-allocate software assigned to divestment IT asset