Without an organized IT Asset Management process, you have an open door to bad data.
When an item is purchased and received, and models don’t match the invoice, they are not checked in correctly. When service tickets demand the retirement of assets, equipment is often removed physically but not from asset inventory. When employees leave, their equipment is rarely returned back to usable inventory for re-deployment. When assets are disposed, improper chain of custody tracking puts the organization at severe risk of regulatory penalties and loss of sensitive data.
The lack of efficient asset tracking process results in extremely bad quality data which limits your ability to make cost-saving decisions, increases risk, and degrades confidence in your ITAM program as a whole.
More specifically, lack of quality on-demand asset data saddles your organization with the following problems:
- Inability to adequately respond to internal or external hardware audit requests by simply running reports. Lack of confidence in inventory data leads to costly wall-to-wall inventory and data reconciliation activities and often leads to failed audit compliance.
- Inability to easily reconcile deployed asset inventory against the fixed asset registry. Financial compliance mandates including Sarbanes Oxley require accurate controls over the management of fixed assets. Misalignment of configuration, asset and fixed asset databases is a compliance nightmare, and also generates expensive and unnecessary inventory and reconciliation work.
- Inability to comprehensively identify all physical assets currently available “in stock” using an automated, dynamic process. Reports cannot be generated without significant human overhead to avoid unnecessary purchases. This makes it impossible to ensure required assets are available to the business at minimal cost.
- Inability to systematically maintain chain of custody of assets through entire asset lifecycle. For compliance purposes, you need to maintain an audit trail of location, assignment, and status of asset from discovery to disposal. Without this accurate information, your organization is at an increased risk of litigation due to inappropriate disposal methods and lack of ability to validate that the disposed products were outside your chain of command. This also increases the need for formal scheduled human audits.
- Lack of visibility into the number of instances present for each version of a hardware component. If you do not know the true cost of ownership of your managed asset classes, you cannot standardize and use the lowest-cost and highest-value asset models.
- Inability to identify hardware maintenance volume needs based on deployment information. Without this information, you cannot negotiate service contracts tailored precisely to your needs. This often results in increased spending and risks of inadequate coverage for your asset base.
- Lack of access to a single register of all IT hardware owned by the company, across the global footprint, and viewable by product category, lifecycle category, and geographic location. Since your shareholders, financiers (The bank) and government regulators often demand this type of information to align with their ownership and parallel risk, you need a system that will provide this map of assets immediately with little additional overhead. In addition, if you are a public company, you will not be able to adequately satisfy asset management control requirements mandated by Sarbanes Oxley.
- Inability to identify all deployed assets reaching end of vendor support life. Without this information, you cannot terminate support contracts in a timely manner and avoid overpaying for support that is no longer needed. The lack of access to this information also prevents the planning of refreshes that will ensure Evergreen status where all assets are covered under warranty, and for end-of-life actions such as recycling or disposal.
- Inability to monitor the asset management lifecycle activity and identify areas of poor process adoption and data quality. Without the ability to easily log and run reports on asset tracking activities, you have no visibility to measure the “buy-in” to your ITAM policy. This prevents you from regularly measuring and refining your ITAM processes and policies to enforce adoption by your people.
- Inability to ensure accurate deployed software component volumes based on knowledge of accurate deployed hardware component volumes. Software license compliance cannot be achieved without managing the hardware platform on which it runs.
- Inability to reclaim equipment when employees leave the organization or transfer to another function. Without the ability to adequately manage the repurposing and reuse of recovered equipment, costs are driven up due to unnecessary purchases.
- Inability to minimize risks associated with the loss of sensitive data. Since you have a better understanding of where your equipment is, your asset tracking program should empower the creation and enforcement of policies and safeguards to minimize data security breaches.
AMI addresses these and other gaps with its world class AssetTrack solution, used by enterprises worldwide. AssetTrack paired with a healthy ITAM program eliminates 98% of all database errors. When confidence in your data is high, ITAM becomes a valuable foundation for IT management.
Learn more about how AMI can help you address these gaps.
