ITALM brings all assets found under the IT umbrella together––tracking the usefulness of software and services, licenses and entitlements, hardware and infrastructure, spares and replacement parts, and so forth, for the entire duration of its life cycle. In addition, ITALM records and monitors such assets to make them accessible, visible, and subject to specific controls and policies.
ITALM also tracks financial activities around those assets—including costs of acquisition, licensing, upgrades, maintenance, and so on. Simply by assembling, combining, and correlating these three bodies of data,
ITALM helps to create a consistent record of IT assets within an organization.
Before going through the stages of ITALM, consider assessing your current IT strategy to understand how much change is needed to achieve your business objectives. Gartner recommends the following asset management strategy checklist:
- Does your asset strategy reflect your organization’s business objectives?
- Are enterprise leaders convinced that asset management is good for business?
- Is the entire life cycle of every asset fully considered in your strategy?
- Are resources being optimized to manage your entire asset portfolio?
- Are decisions to capitalize, maintain or dispose driven by asset data?
- Does asset data power operational and financial management systems?
- Are asset risks and impacts on business performance assessed?
Stage 1 – Planning
Planning helps to establish the requirement of an asset, based on the evaluation of existing assets. This is done by introducing a management system that can analyze trends and data – allowing the decision-makers to identify the need for the asset and the value it can add to operations.
This first stage of an asset life cycle is crucial for all stakeholders, from financial teams to operators. The decision to purchase an asset relies on this asset fitting a business’s needs. As well as contributing to its operations and generating revenue.
- Identify key issues and business improvement areas
- Develop recommendations
- Construct the business case
- Socialize, communicate, and finalize
- Monitor and manage value realization
Stage 2 – Acquisition
Acquisition refers to the end to end process of procuring not just the asset, but also its successful installation and timely maintenance and repairs. This includes inventory management and procurement actions such as:
- Purchase and receiving of materials and services
- Contract management
- Quality inspection of material
- Storage of the asset until use
- Spare parts management
- Asset Tracking and Ownership
- Inspections and documentation
- Location Installation
- Required Qualifications
- Establishing ongoing Maintenance Strategies
Strategies:
Process alignment: Siloed processes prevent the organization from continuously improving. The same is true in ITALM. Capture savings and efficiencies, reduce risk and track improvements with a centralized asset management process.
Integration with other systems, such as Geographical Information System (GIS), is critical, especially for organizations with a high number of distributed assets. This type of integration also delivers data accuracy within the enterprise which can help mitigate unexpected problems as soon as they arise.
Stage 3 – Operations
Once the asset is fully integrated into operations, it can be used to perform its intended task. It is during this phase that the maintenance program is monitoring the asset to ensure it is operating at peak performance and delivering desired results.
Enterprise Asset Management Systems can monitor assets for alerts and disruptions to operations. Predictive analytics automate asset maintenance schedules to ensure asset performance and avoid unnecessary down time.
- Deploy the assets and change state from inventory to in-use.
- Discover the assets in the network for software and hardware inventory
- Allocate software to a hardware asset
- Add relationship maps
- Schedule scans and get audit history
- Complete ownership tracking
- Software compliance and license management
- Calculate total cost of ownership of an asset including depreciation
- Maintain contracts for assets
- Notify technicians of expiry dates
- Identify impact through dependency mapping in the asset database
- Track software license agreements
Stage 4 – Retirement and Disposal
The final stage in the asset lifecycle is disposal. This occurs when the asset has reached the end of its useful life and is no longer helping the organization run an efficient production.
Strategies:
- Maintain a historical asset story: when was it purchased, what did it cost, how much have we paid for maintenance, how much does it cost to replace it. This will inform sound decision-making on asset retirement and disposal.
- Evaluate assets against future organizational objectives: Simply renewing a life cycle of an asset won’t be sufficient. The replacement must deliver significant improvements and exceed its previous performance or it should be removed from the roster completely.
ITALM Key Business Benefit
At UDT, our Lifecycle Management solution is designed to make it easier for our clients to run their businesses without having to worry about the time, cost, and effort it takes to manage day-to-day EndPoint Support. Bringing advanced analytics into the mix, we help you take advantage of data to make informed IT budgetary decisions and understand how to improve productivity and user-satisfaction for all stakeholders.
Optimizing Costs
Most organizations don’t have the time, bandwidth, and scale needed to manage, support, and secure an entire fleet of EndPoints. UDT is able to provide an end-to-end solution for lifecycle management delivered as a service with a flexible, scalable, and predictable consumption model. Spend only on what you need to achieve your organization’s IT goals.
Data-driven Budgetary Decisions
Data doesn’t lie. Our Lifecycle Management solution helps organizations refine their data and put it to use through advanced analytics and BI. With data-based insight, business leaders can make informed and sustainable IT budgetary decisions.
Productivity and User-satisfaction
UDT’s Lifecycle Management solution keeps your IT assets updated, supported, and optimized for user-experience. Without having to worry about EndPoint performance, security, and support, end-user satisfaction and productivity will improve across the board.
Security For Critical IT Resources
Approximately 90% of data breaches happen at the endpoint. Without a proper Asset Lifecycle Security strategy in place, securing a fleet of devices can become complex, overwhelming and ultimately very costly.
Asset Lifecycle Security saves organizations the headache of replacing damaged devices or retrieving sensitive data and instead allows that time and money to be spent on essential business objectives.
Imagine an employee working remotely is using an organization’s property, such as a company issued laptop. Suppose this employee quits their job, or is laid off, and then refuses to return the device. A proactive Asset Lifecycle Security solution can take control of that device wherever it may be at any moment. It is possible to utilize your asset management tool to push messages to the device to communicate instructions for returning it. If warnings are ignored, the system will wipe the device clean without permission from the employee to access their device. This feature will help to protect an organization’s most valuable asset – its data!
