It’s often taken for granted that IT can easily and accurately provide definitive answers to questions like “how many laptops do we have at Site 1?” or “do we have the right number of SQL licenses?” or “how much do we need to budget for device replacements next year?” After all, don’t we know what we have?

IT can’t easily provide these answers because to do so you must track hardware and software throughout its lifecycle – which is not easy. And unfortunately, you often need to respond to these questions on very short notice because of an audit or to support a budgeting exercise.

IT Asset Management (ITAM) is the solution. It’s not a new solution – the discipline has been around for decades. But the key to success is to deploy the practice in a way that is sustainable, right-sized, and maximizes value.

Use our practical methodology to develop and document your approach to ITAM that is aligned with the goals of your organization.

Andrew Sharp Research Director Infrastructure & Operations Practice Info-Tech Research Group

Cost optimization, application rationalization and reduction of technical debt are all considered valuable to right-size spending and improve service outcomes. Without access to accurate data, these activities require significant investments of time and effort, starting with creation of point-in-time inventories, which lengthens the timeline to reaching project value and may still not be accurate.

Cost optimization and reduction of technical debt should be part of your culture and technical roadmap rather than one-off projects. Why? Access to accurate information enables the organization to quickly make decisions and pivot plans as needed. Through asset management, ongoing harvest and redeployment of assets improves utilization-to-spend ratios. We would never see any organization saying, “We’ve closed our year end books, let’s fire the accountants,” but often see this valuable service relegated to the back burner. Similar to the philosophy that “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the next best time is now,” the sooner you can start to collect, validate, and analyze data, the sooner you will find value in it.

Sandi Conrad Principal Research Director Infrastructure & Operations Practice Info-Tech Research Group

You have a mandate to create an accurate and actionable database of the IT assets in your environment, but:

• The data you have is often incomplete or wrong.
• Processes are broken or non-existent.
• Your tools aren’t up to the task of tracking ever more hardware, software, and relevant metadata.
• The role of stakeholders outside the core ITAM team isn’t well defined or understood.

It is challenging to make needed changes because:

• There’s cultural resistance to asset tracking, it’s seen as busywork that doesn’t clearly create value.
• Decentralized IT teams aren’t generating the data required to track hardware and licenses.
• ITAM can’t direct needed tool improvements because the admins don’t report to ITAM.
• It’s hard to find time to improve processes given the day-to-day demands on your time.

• Develop an approach and strategy for ITAM that is sustainable and aligned with your business priorities.
• Clarify the structure for the ITAM program, including scope, responsibility and accountability, centralization vs. decentralization, outsourcing vs. insourcing, and more.
• Create a practical roadmap to guide improvement.
• Summarize your strategy and approach using Info-Tech’s templates for review with stakeholders.

Unlock business value with IT asset management

• IT asset management (ITAM) is the practice of maintaining accurate, accessible, and actionable data on the assets within the organization’s IT estate. Each IT asset will have a record that tracks it across its lifecycle from purchase to disposal.
• ITAM’s value is realized through other processes and practice areas that can leverage ITAM data to manage risk, improve IT services, and control costs.
• Develop an approach to ITAM that maximizes the value delivered to the business and IT. ITAM succeeds when its partners succeed at delivering business value, and it fails when it doesn’t show value to those partners.

This blueprint will help you develop your approach for the management of IT hardware and software, including cloud services. Leverage other Info-Tech methodologies to dive directly into developing hardware asset management procedures, software asset management procedures, or to implement configuration management best practices.

Info-Tech Members report significant savings from implementing our hardware and software asset management frameworks. In order to maximize value from the process-focused methodologies below, develop your ITAM strategy first.

ITAM provides both early and ongoing value

Example: Software Savings from ITAM

This chart shows the money saved between the first quote and the final price for software and maintenance by a five-person ITAM team. Over a year and a half, they saved their organization a total of $7.5 million from a first quote total of $21 million over that period.

This is a perfect example of the direct value that ITAM can provide on an ongoing basis to the organization, when properly supported and integrated with IT and the business.

Examples of up-front value delivered in the first year of the ITAM practice:

• Save money by reviewing and renegotiating critical, high-spend, and undermanaged software and service contracts.
• Redeploy or dispose of clearly unused hardware and software.
• Develop and enforce standards for basic hardware and software.
• Improve ITAM data quality and build trust in the results.

Examples of long-term value from ongoing governance, management, and operational ITAM activities:

• Optimize spend: Reallocate unused hardware and software, end unneeded service agreements, and manage renewals and audits.
• Reduce risk: Provide comprehensive asset data for security controls development and incident management; manage equipment disposal.
• Improve IT service: Support incident, problem, request, and change management with ITAM data. Develop new solutions with an understanding of what you have already.

• ITAM takes a village, but stakeholders aren’t aware of their role. ITAM processes rely on technicians to update asset records, vendors to supply asset data, administrators to manage tools, leadership to provide direction and support, and more.
• Constant change in the IT and business environment undermines the accuracy of ITAM records (e.g. licensing and contract changes, technology changes that break discovery tools, personnel and organizational changes).
• Improvement efforts are overwhelmed by day-to-day activities. One study found that 83% of SAM teams’ time is consumed by audit-related activities. (Flexera State of ITAM Report 2022) A lack of improvement becomes a vicious cycle when stakeholders who don’t see the value of ITAM decline to dedicate resources for improvement.
• Stakeholders expect ITAM tools to be a cure-all, but even at their best, they can’t provide needed answers without some level of configuration, manual input, and supervision.
• There’s often a struggle to connect ITAM to value. For example, respondents to Info-Tech’s Management & Governance Diagnostic consistently rank ITAM as less important than other processes that ITAM directly supports (e.g. budget management and budget optimization). (Info-Tech MGD Diagnostic (n=972 unique organizations))

• Only 28% of SAM teams track IaaS and PaaS spend, and only 35% of SAM teams track SaaS usage.
• Increasing SAM maturity is a challenge for 76% of organizations.
• 10% of organizations surveyed have spent more than $5 million in the last three years in audit penalties and true-ups.
• Half of all of organizations lack a viable SAM tool.
• Seventy percent of SAM teams have a shortfall of qualified resources.
(Flexera State of ITAM Report 2022)

Business-Aligned Spend
Optimization and Transparency

Facilitate IT Services
and Products

Actionable, Accessible,
and Accurate Data

Context-Aware Risk Management
and Security Controls

Plan & Govern

Business Goals, Risks, and Structure

• ITAM Goals & Priorities
• Roles, Accountability, Responsibilities
• Scope

Ongoing Management Commitment

• Resourcing & Funding
• Policies & Enforcement
• Continuous Improvement

Culture

• ITAM Education, Awareness & Training
• Organizational Change Management

Build & Manage

Tools & Data

• ITAM Tool Selection & Deployment
• Configuration Management Synchronization
• IT Service Management Integration

Process

• Process Management
• Data & Process Audits
• Document Management

People, Policies, and Providers

• Stakeholder Management
• Technology Standardization
• Vendor & Contract Management

Our methodology will help you build a business-aligned strategy and approach for your ITAM practice with the following outputs:

• Business-aligned ITAM priorities, opportunities, and goals.
• Current and target state ITAM maturity.
• Metrics and KPIs.
• Roles, responsibilities, and accountability.
• Insourcing, outsourcing, and (de)centralization.
• Tools and technology.
• A documentation framework.
• Initiatives, a roadmap, and a communication plan.

• 1.1 Define ITAM and brainstorm opportunities and challenges.
Executive Alignment Working Session:
• 1.2 Review organizational priorities, strategy, and key initiatives.
• 1.3 Align executive priorities with ITAM opportunities and priorities.
• 1.4 Identify business-aligned ITAM goals and target maturity.
• 1.5 Write mission and vision statements.
• 1.6 Define ITAM metrics and KPIs.

• 2.1 Define ITAM scope.
• 2.2 Acquire ITAM services (outsourcing and contracting).
• 2.3 Centralize or decentralize ITAM capabilities.
• 2.4 Create a RACI for the ITAM practice.
• 2.5 Align ITAM with other service management practices.
• 2.6 Evaluate ITAM tools and integrations.
• 2.7 Create a plan for internal and external audits.
• 2.8 Improve your budget processes.
• 2.9 Establish a documentation framework.
• 2.10 Create a roadmap and communication plan.

• Set a foundation and direction for an ITAM practice that will allow IT to manage risk, optimize spend, and enhance services in line with business requirements.
• Establish accountability and responsibility for essential ITAM activities. Decide where to centralize or decentralize accountability and authority. Identify where outsourcing could add value.
• Create a roadmap with concrete, practical next steps to develop an effective, right-sized ITAM practice.

• Plan and control technology spend with confidence based on trustworthy ITAM data.
• Enhance IT’s ability to rapidly and effectively support new priorities and launch new projects. Effective ITAM can support more streamlined procurement, deployment, and management of assets.
• Implement security controls that reflect your total technology footprint. Reduce the risk that a forgotten device or unmanaged software turns your organization into the next Colonial Pipeline.

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Call #2: Review business priorities.

Call #3: Identify ITAM goals & target maturity.

Call #6: Acquire ITAM services.

Call #8: ITAM and service management.

Tools and integrations.

Call #11: Budgets & documentation

Call #12: Roadmap, comms plan. Wrap-up.

Phase 1:

Establish business-aligned ITAM goals and priorities

Phase 1

1.1 Define ITAM and brainstorm opportunities and challenges.

Executive Alignment Working Session:

1.2 Review organizational priorities, strategy, and key initiatives.

1.3 Align executive priorities with ITAM opportunities & priorities.

1.4 Identify business-aligned ITAM goals and target maturity.

1.5 Write mission and vision statements.

1.6 Define ITAM metrics and KPIs.

Phase 2

2.1 Define ITAM scope.

2.2 Acquire ITAM services (outsourcing and contracting).

2.3 Centralize or decentralize ITAM capabilities.

2.4 Create a RACI for the ITAM practice.

2.5 Align ITAM with other service management practices.

2.6 Evaluate ITAM tools and integrations.

2.7 Create a plan for internal and external audits.

2.8 Improve your budget processes.

2.9 Establish a documentation framework.

2.10 Create a roadmap and communication plan.

• This methodology and the related slides are intended to be executed via intensive, collaborative working sessions using the rest of this slide deck.
• Ensure the working sessions are a success by working through these steps before you start work on your IT asset management strategy.

1. Identify participants

2. Estimate assets managed today

3. Create a working folder

It is also a baseline snapshot your ability to relay key ITAM metrics quickly and confidently, so you can measure progress (in terms of greater confidence) over time.

1. Download the estimation tracker below. Add any additional line items that are particularly important to the organization.
2. Time-box this exercise to an hour. Use your own knowledge and existing data repositories to identify count/spend for each line item, then add a margin of error to your guess. Larger margins of error on larger counts will typically indicate larger risks.
3. Track any assumptions, data sources used, or SMEs consulted in the comments.

Download the IT Asset Estimation Tracker

“Any time there is doubt about the data and it doesn’t get explained or fixed, then a new spreadsheet is born. Data validation and maintenance is critical to avoid the hidden costs of having bad data”

Allison Kinnaird,
Operations Practice Lead,
Info-Tech Research Group

1. Download a copy of the ITAM Strategy Template.
   1. This will be the repository for all the work you do in the activities listed in this blueprint; take a moment to read it through and familiarize yourself with the contents.
2. House the template in a shared repository that can house other related work in progress. Share this folder with participants so they can check in on your progress.
3. You’ll see this callout box: Add your results to your copy of the ITAM Strategy Template as you work through activities in this blueprint. Copy the output to the appropriate slide in the ITAM Strategy Template.