With many companies contemplating implementation of virtualisation strategies, creating their own cloud or moving some of their in-house services to other cloud service providers, the need and importance of managing the life cycle of your IT assets, which includes hardware and software licences, remain important.
An IT asset life cycle management system should help organisations manage their asset process from the request right through moves, adds and changes, all the way to managing the disposal/end-of-life process. It should do this while managing all types of related contracts and keeping a history or audit of whatever needs to be tracked for governance and compliance.
Adopting these new strategies may in some cases reduce the number of assets, but the increased speed of change and increased flexibility adds to the complexity and challenge of managing them and increases the need for an ITAM solution.
An enterprise IT asset management (ITAM) solution should help organisations easily answer the following related questions:
* What assets do we have (physical, virtual, software, contracts, etc)?
* Where are they?
* Who uses or owns them?
* When did they get acquired?
* How much did they cost and are costing?
* What business services do they belong to?
* What contracts do we have for assets?
* What is the history or audit trail of the assets and contracts?
* Who needs to approve for a request, move, change or disposal?
* Who are the vendors and are they delivering on their asset contracts?
Apart from a solution having the capability and functionality to answer the above questions, we have found that there are a few other essential solution requirements to help ensure the implementation of an ITAM is a success.
These are:
* The system must have the ability to make it easy for users to interact with it, otherwise they will soon try to bypass the process.
* The system should have a visual workflow so it's easy for anyone to understand what a process looks like and where a process is at a point in time.
* It should have automation wherever possible, for example, adding assets, data validation, escalations, notifications, etc.
* It should integrate with other systems such as financial, HR and service management.
The benefits an organisation can get from a good ITAM solution could be:
* Cost reduction and cost avoidance
* Improved control
* Better planning
* Improved compliancy
* Improved efficiency
SORTIT, a Gold HP Software partner, combines the provision of the relevant software products together with implementation services and best practice consulting to provide companies with a total asset management solution.
SORTIT a Gold HP software partner have been focusing in providing asset management solutions and professional services for many years. SORTIT was started in 2005. The company has quickly built a reputation as a company that provides quality and fair value in everything they deliver. Their focus is in providing market-leading IT solutions and consultancy to help customers optimise their IT so they can achieve more business value from IT investments.
Please visit http://www.sortit.co.za.
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