5 Business Benefits of IT Asset Management (ITAM)

17 February 2021
5 minute read
Best practice

5 Business Benefits of IT Asset Management (ITAM)

17 February 2021
5 minute read

Whiteboard Wednesday Episode 3: 5 Benefits of IT Asset Management (ITAM).

Whiteboard Wednesday is me, a whiteboard and learning about all things IT Asset Management (ITAM), every Wednesday!

This week we explore 5 key areas an organisation will see an impact when it stands up an ITAM practice.

https://youtu.be/CFOXTGbhlc0


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5 Business Benefits of IT Asset Management – Transcript

Abbreviated transcript:

Five business benefits of doing IT Asset Management (ITAM).

Money

The first one is the money. There are four R’s to think about here. Remove, reuse, reconfigure, and renegotiate. 30% to 40% of all software, whether it’s onsite, in the cloud or wherever is wasted. So remove that software, you’re going to save money, you can reuse hardware and software. When somebody leaves your organization, you can claw back their laptop, you can claw back their Salesforce subscription, and then other software, any cloud instances, they might have stood up, and let’s reuse them.

You can reconfigure. We don’t need to go down the high street in a Bugatti Veyron to pick up our shopping, we need assets that suit the job in hand, let’s reconfigure to save money. And finally, you can renegotiate if we know exactly what we’re using, how it’s being used, how it is configured, we can renegotiate to save money, so that we can still meet business requirements, but at less cost.

Risk

Three areas of risk to consider around IT assets, you have contractual risk, you have regulatory risk, and you have legal risk. So contractual risk. An example is you don’t ever buy software and own it, you buy the right to use software. And that comes with terms and conditions. Typically they’re in a contract, breach that contact and you’re pushing risk onto your business, you also have regulatory risk. So depending on what sector, what country you live, there’s going to be regulatory risk around the use of IT assets. For example, if you work in banking or the finance sector, the regulators are going to say, if you are reckless with your use of IT assets, you’re not going to get to run a bank anymore. And the final type of risk is legal risk. So for example, you can’t just take old IT equipment, stick it in the dustbin, stick it in landfill, there are legal requirements around how you do that. There’s also copyright law that protects IT assets, and you need to adhere to those two.

Operational Efficiency

Now, if you’ve done cost and risk properly, you’re gonna have some fantastic data in which to create very happy users, very happy stakeholders. And we’re going to call that operational efficiency. If you have great IT Asset data, you can support your users and stakeholders better, you can be more agile, you can move faster, you can respond to business requirements a lot quicker if you know what you have, you know what’s been used.

You can also take your IT Asset data and share it with the rest of the enterprise. So CMDB, procurement, enterprise architecture, projects, HR, all of these departments can benefit from great ITAM data. As a result they can do their jobs better, they can make smarter decisions.

Information Security

The next business benefit is if we’re doing all this properly, we’ve got great asset data, we’re managing our investment in it like an asset, then we’re going to be a lot more secure. It is foundational to cybersecurity, how on earth are you supposed to secure what you have if you don’t know what you have, where it is and how it is configured. It is foundational to doing Information Security properly. And it’s very useful for supporting our friends in IT security to keep our data safe to keep our network safe.

Sustainability

The fifth and final benefit of having an ITAM practice is our impact on the environment and sustainability or green it. So the choices we make in IT, hardware, software and cloud services have an impact on the environment in terms of energy consumption, and sustainability.

And if you consider the extraction of certain resources in order to make it equipment, for example, it has a disproportionately large impact on the environment. And by having an ITAM practice and understanding what we have, how it is used and how it is configured, we can enable the business to make smarter decisions around choosing sustainable partners and sustainable suppliers. We can be smart around usage so we can reduce our energy consumption as assets are used throughout their lifecycle. And we can make smarter choices when it comes to the end of life of assets too.

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