Managing IT Assets
Hey friend.
Let's talk about IT asset management.
*Snooze FEST!!!*
Over 75% of organizations are doing a crummy job at managing their IT assets and losing thousands of dollars per year. IT asset management is an important process that will help you be more successful in both the short-term and long-term
In this video, we're going to answer three important questions when it comes to IT Asset Management:
What is it?
Why is it important?
How to get started?
What is it?
Simply put, IT Asset Management is the process of keeping tabs on what hardware and software you have available for your employees. It's a historical database to let you answer the following questions:
What is it?
Where did it come from?
How much did it cost?
When did we buy it?
Who has it right now and when did they get it? When did it come back?
How many do we have?
When you can answer these questions, you'll set your business up for success, which leads to
the second question.
Why is it important?
The hardware and software used by your team are assets and are critical to the success of your business. A few of the reasons why it's important:
1. IT stops being a junk drawer
You get useful information about your IT environment that can help you make decisions around the stuff your team uses.
2. Know your investment
Tracking assets helps you understand how much money you've invested into technology. There might be some tax incentives to knowing what assets you have for write-off or depreciation purposes. You can track the costs of these purchases and get some financial benefit from having purchased them. If it's not tracked, you won't know if you can benefit from it.
*NOTE: I'm not an accountant. Talk to your accountant about any potential financial benefit you might get regarding hardware and software purchases in your business.
3. Save money
Probably a bigger incentive behind tracking IT assets is so you can save money. I've seen a lot of companies that buy laptops or software licenses because they don't know if they have one available for use. They just keep shelling out money while there's plenty of equipment that's going unused but already paid for. You could potentially save around 25% of your IT budget by tracking your IT assets better.
How can you get started?
You can get started tracking assets in something as easy as a spreadsheet. Check out this link for a basic IT Asset Tracking tool I created in Google Sheets. Make a copy, make it your own.
Poll your employees with a form or a quick meeting so you can get the current IT assets tracked.
If you want to kick it up a notch, you could track IT Assets in your CRM or another database tool that can let you report and gain better insight. You can also get a head start on workstation and server tracking with device management tools like N-Able or JAMF, which we'll cover in another video.
Tracking your IT assets is an excellent way to reduce waste in your business and understand the impact technology has on your day-to-day operations. I hope that you can see those benefits by getting started today.