How a centralized enterprise platform drives IT asset visibility and automation

Deliver ITAM through SAM & HAM

If knowledge is power, and you don’t have sufficient data to answer IT asset management questions quickly, you aren’t operating at your highest level. To get your ITAM sorted, your team needs to know:

• How many hardware assets do we have and how many need to be refreshed?
• Where are they located?
• Who is using them and the software installed on them?
• Are they current with our security requirements?

When your IT Service Management, Configuration Management, Hardware Asset Management and Software Asset Management and foundational data aren’t unified, you can’t determine the overall risk and cost of your asset estate. Data points like users, groups, locations, and departments are critical to your security team's ability to manage your estate. Endpoint solutions reporting can take days or even weeks to collate and analyze, increasing the mean time to respond and resolve incidents and requests, while also damaging overall employee experience.

SoftwareOne is reducing the burden of managing IT asset estates by leveraging ServiceNow’s centralized platform, which allows enterprises to gather near-real time reporting with drill-down capabilities, build actionable workflows, and incorporate AI to reduce manual efforts, all while tracking historical data changes to allow for informed decision making regarding hardware refreshes, software procurement or reclamation, and governance of the overall asset lifecycle from initial request to decommission.

Access to reliable data across multiple departments and leaders enables you to adopt a proactive approach to strategic decision making. Whether you’re planning a hardware refresh, addressing security concerns, or preparing for a software audit, a centralized repository can boost productivity and facilitate rapid action. To get started, form a team of key stakeholders to assess the current status of your IT asset management, taking care to build consensus around planning, visibility, accuracy, and manageability.

Planning

Your ITAM journey begins with understanding what you currently own. Next, you can effectively and proactively plan for purchasing.

For example, consider questions such as:

• Are there instances where we can redeploy hardware assets in our inventory?
• Can we reclaim licenses that are not being used?
• What software/hardware options are available to us that may better suit our future needs?

Visibility

To make strategic decisions throughout the organization, you’ll need to see beyond what you own, to consider where each asset is located, what it’s running on, who is using it, and other data. Enterprise platforms for ITAM increase visibility of asset relationships to underlying infrastructure, relate incidents for a specific hardware model or software product, and more. Leveraging a system with automated lifecycle data for both hardware and software products provides an up-to-date understanding of when something is nearing end of life, end of support, or end of extended support, while giving your teams time to find alternatives or make arrangements for upgrades/updates.

Accuracy

The built-in data certification/attestation, workflow automation, and AI capabilities of enterprise platforms for ITAM help you reduce manual efforts and data entry errors, reducing overall cost and maintenance while ensuring accurate, trustworthy, real-time data for up-to-date, accurate reports at any moment. Built-in reporting capabilities provide metrics and key performance indicators around completeness, compliance, and correctness of the underlying configuration management database. As a result, you have the tools you need to make fast, effective decisions.

Manageability

Automated asset lifecycle data helps you monitor, maintain and manage your IT estate. Accurate reporting and a unified system that increases visibility enables you to manage your IT estate from a single pane of glass, allowing teams to focus on strategy and innovation instead of minutiae.