Sharing this from Phil Bowermater at Ivanti-Cherwell...
As organisations experience increasing complexity and expanding perimeters, IT professionals are looking to get a better understanding into their distributed software and hardware assets. IT teams need immediate access to detailed information in context of services and underlying assets they run on to make more intelligent decisions about their IT
investments. Having asset visibility at their fingertips enables them to maximize cost savings, secure assets, and improve the employee experience. In doing so, they align digital infrastructure with their business needs.
IT asset management, or ITAM, enables greater control over IT landscapes, and optimizes asset lifecycle management. Organizations are able to more quickly and easily manage costs, and improve agility and compliance.
ITAM starts with knowing what you have within your IT estate. As enterprise perimeters expand with multi-clouds, the everywhere workforce, and IoT, managing digital assets and their costs grows more complicated and expensive.
Visibility of digital assets improves help desk services
Without question, ITAM and ITSM are more effective when integrated. If you already use ITSM, but still use spreadsheets to track assets, integrating ITAM will make help desk staff and system admins more effective and improve the employee experience. By better understanding the lifecycle of enterprise-wide assets, and having the information easily consumed within an intuitive dashboard and in context of the service, they can make better service delivery and management decisions.
ITAM enables proactive service management by identifying, classifying and managing assets, no matter their location. Service desk personnel need detailed information about their user’s software and hardware. The information needs to be instantly available, so they can better support their users. With asset information at their fingertips, greater insights will be at their disposal to help resolve issues with efficiency and speed. ITAM helps service desk personnel identify trouble ticket patterns developing within specific software versions and hardware models. They can instantly see the product’s warranty status, so they can effectively guide the user.
Integrating ITAM helps improve IT service management operations and outcomes:
- Service desk personnel need detailed information about hardware and software to understand the root causes behind the issues. ITAM can assist by quickly identifying and helping resolve conflicts related to unauthorized software that causes operational issues.
- When users request new assets, it’s important to understand what they already have. ITAM helps the service desk avoid overprovisioning and overspending. It also prevents incompatibility issues, when new software is known to conflict with certain OS’s or applications.
- Detailed information about the assets helps automate self-service capabilities. This is particularly true for role-based IT profiles. A new application request can be compared to the assets already installed on the user’s device, verified against approved software for their role, and automatically installed.
