Why IT Asset Management Is Vital to Successful Digital Work

Christen Martines | April 27, 2023

BizTechMagazine.com, 2023, by Lauren Glenn Manfuso

With digital work here to stay, business IT teams are juggling a shifting technology inventory. Here’s how the right management tools can help.

The concept of digital work sounds relatively simple: Give employees laptops and send them home to do the same jobs they did in a corporate office. But for the IT teams tasked with procuring, maintaining and tracking company technology assets, digital work environments are often anything but straightforward.

This is where IT asset management (ITAM) becomes critical. Today’s workforces aren’t just remote; they can be distributed all over the world. Employees require a suite of IT hardware and software to foster productivity and protect the company from cybersecurity risks. Meanwhile, the bigger the employer and the more dispersed the workforce, the bigger the headache for IT teams.

In a 2022 Forrester study, 51 percent of businesses reported that lost laptops and other edge devices had compromised their security. “A comprehensive ITAM program will provide consistent views to all assets in the organization,” says Forrester analyst Carlos Casanova. “It reduces duplication of effort across the organization, which is not only costly but also causes confusion and increases security and operational risks.”

What Is ITAM and How Does It Work?

The first thing to understand about ITAM is that it’s more than just a single product or technology. “When the term IT asset management is used,” Casanova says, “it’s often viewed in a narrow IT scope, which is mostly inventory management with some financial management component.”

In reality, however, ITAM is a holistic programmatic strategy that incorporates a range of technologies, policies and workflows to facilitate across-the-board management of all IT assets, including software, data and more.

By uniting the financial, inventory, contractual and risk management objectives attached to a company’s various IT assets, ITAM helps organizations to more efficiently and effectively manage the overall lifecycle of these assets and informs better tactical and strategic decision-making.

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