Sweat your IT assets

IT asset management is very important for any organisation. It refers not only to managing the IT assets but also amounts to their effective utilisation, optimisation or virtualisation.

Asset management starts from the organisations business requirement. It is the prime responsibility of IT managers to assess and ensure that right kinds of assets are bought into the organisation.

Once the procurement process starts, it ends with the assets complete life cycle management. Here, assets are not only hardware but also include software in the business environment.

A typical asset management process goes through the following life cycle:
New business requirement
Request and approval process
Procurement management
Life cycle management
Redeployment and disposal management

IT asset management practices are process-driven and matured through iterative and continual improvement process. Asset management data is very important and is required in an organisation at various levels such as end users, budget managers, IT service departments (for providing information on warranties), and finance (for invoice reconciliation and updates for fixed asset inventories).

IT asset management is a very challenging task for IT managers since many organisations normally outsource the whole asset management part and dont have a single integrated asset management application to manage IT assets. In addition, due to high attrition rates, normally assets are re-allocated to different employees at different locations as per the business needs but that doesnt get automatically updated. Manual verification of asset data is also not full proof due to human errors, so the sanctity of asset data is in question most of the time.

IT asset inventory is very critical for many management decisions like opting for some newer technology for business benefits, asset upgrade decision, and asset optimisation or virtualisation decision. IT managers struggle to maintain accurate asset details in large organisations in the absence of an integrated asset management system.
IT assets data requires best business practices to be in place to manage it properly. It is advisable that IT managers adopt a process-driven approach and follow best business practices. A good IT asset management system must have linkage with helpdesk management. It will be even better if it is also integrated with HR, procurement and finance systems.

One way of adopting best business practices is to drive an ISO 20000 or Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certification in the organisation. This will really help a lot in building and adopting the best business practices across the organisation. This will not only help in organising the assets but also lead to many business benefits like virtualisation and optimum utilisation of assets.

Today, there are many freeware asset management applications, which are available on the Internet. These applications can be downloaded and further customised as per the organisation needs. If the organisation is ready to go for a standard asset management application then one may opt for an ITIL/ISO 20000 compliant system.

These applications will automate the whole activity starting from assets requisition till its disposal. There are tools available, which can automate the capturing of asset data and populate the same in configuration management database (CMDB). The automatic capturing of asset data in real time ensures that all asset movements are recorded in the system and asset data is always updated. By using advanced tools, we can find out the actual usage details of each asset like who has used the system, through which application and for what duration. This information helps a lot in ensuring that each IT asset is optimally used in an organisation.

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