Beyond The Inertia of Spreadsheets: The ITAM Plan That Saves You Big

Imagine Sarah working her second week as an IT manager at a mid-sized tech company. When she opens her laptop, Tom, her assistant, hands her a big pile of sheets filled with details of the company’s IT assets. 

Sarah is taken aback momentarily; she does not know where to start. Reliance on spreadsheets and manual data recording still prevails at the company. Result? Distressed staff, incoherent and scattered records, and lack of visibility into the company’s IT operations—all due to an absent ITAM roadmap. 

Without strategically following an ITAM plan, businesses are at a high risk of approaching IT needs reactively rather than proactively. This means addressing the needs as they arise without thoroughly assessing how and when they should be met. Reluctance to create and follow an ITAM strategy impacts your IT transparency in the long term and fuels ITAM inertia, a practice that can increase your operational costs manifold. 

What is ITAM inertia? 

ITAM inertia refers to an organizations’ reluctance towards adopting and implementing ITAM strategies for enhanced IT asset control. It arises from a failure to move from basic IT asset tracking functionalities to in-depth ITAM that drives results. ITAM inertia prevents organizations from realizing the real benefits of ITAM in terms of cost control, SaaS management, software sprawl, and risk management. 

It’s the organizational equivalent of Newton’s first law of motion: a system at rest tends to stay at rest, and a system in motion tends to stay in motion with the same velocity unless acted upon by an external force. If IT inefficiencies are not dealt with, a powerful and automated IT asset management solution is needed, or the risk of redundancies will continue to loom. 

But how do you, as an IT manager, recognize when your organization is experiencing ITAM inertia and lacks an ITAM strategy? Look for the following signs in your IT infrastructure to identify gaps contributing to ITAM inertia that only an ITAM strategy can help overcome.

Why does ITAM inertia occur? 

A survey found that 81% of ITAM teams think that rapidly evolving cloud management and changes in IT practices make it challenging for organizations to adopt ITAM maturity. This means continued prevalence of ITAM inertia. 

Problem #1: Over-reliance on legacy and outdated systems

Legacy systems like spreadsheets lack SaaS discovery and auto-discovery capabilities for IT asset tracking. The records are fragmented with little to no coherence in terms of their relevance and data consolidation. Manual records are usually updated only when audits are nearing; this practice stems from leadership’s thinking that “ITAM is a back-office function.” 

Older systems are also more vulnerable to security risks and cyber attacks, and patches are only implemented when the risks become unavoidable. This means systems have: 

• Compliance gaps: Outdated systems may not track license usage accurately, leading to software audits and potential penalties. 
• Data silos: Without seamless integration, data on hardware, software, and cloud assets lives in data silos due to separate tools or departments, reducing coordination and strategic insight.
• Employee frustration: IT teams and end-users face delays with impacted productivity and experience being stuck in loops to get approval for reliable tools.

Example: Devices go missing, and IT managers keep using spreadsheets to record the usage of IT assets and software licenses, only to discover over or under-utilization of IT resources. 

Problem #2: Lack of ownership amongst departments 

Departments mostly use a combination of SaaS products and IT devices without recording their usage in an easily accessible, centralized platform. The lack of records indicates ownership concerns, as no department head can be held accountable for their IT assets. 

Missing clarity on ownership soon impacts the overall IT infrastructure in the shape of duplicate purchases, missed SaaS renewals, and untimely IT asset disposals. Staff may look for IT devices already in other departments, wasting their time and efforts. 

The inability to consolidate IT asset details into one platform shows unstandardized IT governance due to leadership’s lack of interest in taking strategic IT initiatives. These challenges keep piling up until: 

• Missing devices: Employees leave without returning laptops or removing company software from their personal devices.
• Extra purchases: IT buys devices without informing finance, leading to inconsistent asset records.
• Inefficient procurement management: Procurement orders software licenses that are never deployed or tracked by IT.
• Data security risks: HR forgets to coordinate with IT to deprovision user access as an employee leaves, creating data exposure risks.

This is especially true for BYOD device management, where even a slight negligence in checking employee devices can cost organizations like yours a lot! Employees connected to your servers may be using corrupted files or sites prone to malware that can infect your entire system and put your organization’s data at risk.  

Example: No shift towards a centralized platform indicates that the inertia problem remains unresolved while no proactive decision is taken to consolidate IT asset details into one place. 

Problem# 3: No visibility across lifecycle stages

In IT asset management, visibility into all lifecycle stages, including procurement, deployment, maintenance, and disposal, is critical. 

When IT assets, both tangible and intangible, are not rigorously tracked, it becomes challenging to monitor their lifecycle. This creates unresolved visibility issues unless all IT stakeholders have complete access to your IT landscape to better utilize the resources. Untracked IT asset lifecycles make it difficult for IT managers to know when equipment is aging, what maintenance contracts are associated with each IT asset, and the license expiration dates or version upgrades due. 

The following table explains the gaps arising in ITAM due to ITAM inertia at each stage of an IT asset’s lifecycle:

Lack of visibility impacts the functionalities of IT systems and increases costs. As per a report, 70% of the survey respondents report that complex IT environments add to their visibility gaps that become reasons for security risks. Lack of visibility creates the following issues:

• Untimely equipment maintenance: Maintaining IT assets can be expensive. Without a proper record of when and why certain maintenance is due, your costs will increase, and it may even lead to the same equipment being checked out and serviced repeatedly while others are neglected. 
• Inefficient resource allocation: Inability to track usage and performance leads to underutilized assets and delays in deploying resources to employees who need them.
• Poor budgeting and forecasting: If an organization does not know what devices are to be disposed of or decommissioned in the near future, it will not be able to plan to arrange for new ones on time. Lack of planning translates into inaccuracies in budgeting and forecasting future expenditures.

Example: An IT manager’s inability to track their Adobe license expiration results from a lack of visibility into their asset lifecycle. This can disrupt operations for their design teams and even lead to SaaS sprawl if managers do not know when to stop purchasing more software. 

Problem #4: Compliance risks and audit failures 

Imagine a scenario where SOC 2 auditors request records of who had access to what device and a complete understanding of your IT ecosystem. Still, you have nothing to show due to missing logs. How would you feel? With over-reliance on manual data recording, it would be nearly impossible to present convincing data to the auditors. 

Result: You would need to push your compliance deadline by two quarters, delaying customer onboarding for enterprise deals. The eventual outcome is missing revenue! 

You are also at risk of violating SaaS compliance regulations like GDPR and SOC 2 regulations if you do not properly decommission devices at the time of their return or check them for unauthorized software. Some employees may even be using blacklisted software, but how would you be able to tell without an ITAM solution? As per Gartner, 75% of employees by 2027 will start acquiring and using IT assets, including software, outside their organization’s visibility. 

This can trigger legal exposure and hefty fines, adding to your organization’s costs. Similarly, complying with regulations can become difficult if your organization is not investing in unified endpoint management; devices will go untracked, and some may even be infected with malware that can impact your IT systems. These untracked devices will cost you at the time of audits! 

Example: Without real usage data, Finance and IT must estimate how many new seats to purchase during a true-up. They overbuy IT devices and software by an overestimated percentage “just to be safe.” Over 12 months, that translates into tens of thousands wasted on unused software and devices. 

Problem #5: Strategic roadblocks and operational inefficiencies

Have you heard from your leadership, “We should not invest in ITAM because it’s not a technical solution.” 

It can be challenging to convince leadership to invest in ITAM solutions due to factors including a preference for an in-house ITAM solution over a cloud-based one, priority given to other projects, and a lack of awareness of the importance of ITAM.  

In light of this, an absent strategic roadmap can lead to the following challenges while managing IT assets:

• Time-consuming reporting: Without a unified record of your software and hardware, you will not be able to compile a detailed report of your current IT asset usage. Data scattered across spreadsheets, procurement software, and emails causes the IT team to spend over 10 business days manually gathering asset usage, purchases, and assignments, resulting in outdated insights by the time the report is completed.
• Onboarding delays: When IT teams are unaware of the backup devices available and which ones to issue to new hires, they struggle to onboard them on time. For example, HR uses a different platform for device requests, while Finance misses the requests, has yet to approve the budget for new devices, and procurement does not acquire them promptly. These delays negatively impact the onboarding process and the productivity of new hires. 
• Budget cuts and prioritization issues: ITAM inertia remains likely if leadership is not convinced of the efficiencies that quality ITAM offers. The situation worsens during budget cuts, as ITAM is often first on the list to face budget constraints due to its perception as serving only an “operational purpose” that can be replaced by manual efforts. The lack of device and SaaS discovery continues to lead to duplicate purchases, underutilization of existing resources, and operational bottlenecks. 

Example: Your organization launches a cloud-first initiative, aiming to shift 70% of its workloads off-premises. But halfway through the migration, you realize no one has a complete inventory of what servers are still in use, what workloads they host, or how many shadow systems exist.

The true benefits of a strategic IT roadmap

A strategic IT roadmap is a forward-looking plan of how your organization monitors, manages, and tracks its IT resources. The main purpose of a strategic IT roadmap is to

• Improve the visibility of IT assets
• Strategically organize the IT infrastructure
• Implement techniques for efficient IT governance
• Prevent over and underutilization of IT assets 
• Optimize SaaS spend to efficiently use the current budget
• Mitigate the chances of Shadow IT altogether 

How can you implement a strategic IT roadmap and achieve these benefits? The answer to this is simple: follow your organization’s vision to create a holistic roadmap that can help you deal with redundancies related to your IT ecosystem. But, building a strategy will not be enough! Try convincing your leadership to invest in an ITAM solution to implement your roadmap wisely while saving costs. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Assess your current ITAM maturity

Start with assessing how well your organization is currently handling its IT resources, including software and hardware, referred to as ITAM maturity analysis. This involves conducting an audit to establish a baseline inventory, identifying gaps in visibility, compliance, and usage, and evaluating your current tools and processes. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are all asset types (laptops, servers, mobile devices, software licenses, SaaS subscriptions, etc.) recorded?
2. Can you track IT assets from procurement to disposal?
3. Is there a formal process for procurement approvals, software license tracking, and decommissioning?
4. Do different departments follow the same procedures, or are processes fragmented?
5. Are you using a dedicated ITAM or SAM tool or relying on spreadsheets?
6. Can you quickly respond to software vendor audits or internal compliance reviews?
7. Do you have a clear view of license entitlements vs. actual usage?
8. Are there checks in place to prevent shadow IT or unapproved software usage?
9. Is there a single source of truth for all IT assets?
10. How long does it take to generate a report for leadership or audits?
    

Use a 5-level scale to evaluate where your organization falls in each dimension:

You can take corrective measures faster and better by assessing how well your existing resources are being used. Gathering enough data to back your findings can also help prove to your leadership why they should spend time and resources on drafting a roadmap and implementing it for IT resource management. 

2. Define goals and long-term objectives

The best way to manage IT assets strategically is to align their use with your organizational goals and objectives. Identify and decide what your organization is looking to achieve and what stage it is currently operating at. 

• Does it want to control costs or scale extensively with risk involved?
• Does it plan on investing in AI-based models that will require IT resources and expertise from IT personnel? If yes, how does it plan on doing that?
• Is your organization invested in identifying shadow IT while letting go of conventional ways of recording?
• What is your organization’s leadership style and take on cloud-based software asset management tools? 

Based on these findings, set clear, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals and objectives for your ITAM function. 

3. Leverage the existing frameworks for phased ITAM iteration

Implementation of an ITAM roadmap does not necessarily have to happen at once. It has to be and can be in phases for complete and more efficient implementation. Organizations should start slow and progress through the maturity stages. During the phased implementation, leverage the existing frameworks for maximum guidance. 

For instance, ISO/IEC 19770 breaks down ITAM into structured components like lifecycle processes, software asset management (SAM), and IT governance, providing guidelines for managing assets securely and efficiently. Ensure you adhere to these frameworks to gain direction for improved implementation. 

You can also break down your ITAM strategy into the following phases while implementing it:

4. Invest in ITAM tools

The best way to execute your ITAM strategy is by using a tool that supports the monitoring and tracking of IT assets. While several SaaS solutions are available in the market, choosing one depends on factors such as your budget, the scope of the system, the number of assets you wish to track, and their functionalities. An ITAM tool is critical as it will enable you to:

• Build an IT asset repository to facilitate users’ finding and tracking IT assets across the organization.
• Stay compliant by offering SaaS compliance and protecting your data from data breaches and cyberattacks. 
• Help optimize your SaaS license management through software license entitlement and normalization. 
• Improve procurement forecasting and reduce redundant spending.
• Conduct internal IT audits to assess the extent of software sprawl and shadow IT.
• Generate detailed reports for extensive data analysis.

ITAM tools are perfect for all organizations looking to automate their ITAM processes. Now is the time of digital transformation and governance! ITAM tools even come equipped with AI capabilities so you can quickly resolve issues without asking anyone around in your organization. You can even set and track IT KPIs on your ITAM tool and see comprehensive insights on the dashboard for analysis.

Start your free trial with EZO AssetSonar and automate your ITAM processes in just a few clicks! 

5. Seek external advice and expertise for guidance

IT managers should not restrict themselves to only one platform for building and implementing an ITAM roadmap. It is a good practice to search for resources on external platforms for ebooks, training materials, industry reports, or forums to gain in-depth knowledge of how other organizations are implementing ITAM strategies. This way, you can build on the success stories of different organizations in your industry and learn from them. You can even ask around what ITAM tools other IT managers are using to combat ITAM inertia. 

Several ITAM vendors also provide onboarding services to ITAM as a part of their implementation program. Leverage those facilities to seek guidance on how their ITAM tool can help your ITAM roadmap throughout its stages.

6. Encourage coordination across departments

Implementing an ITAM roadmap is not possible without coordination among departments. Such coordination ensures that departments do not operate in silos, allowing for accurate asset tracking and monitoring while ensuring compliance with regulations. An ITAM tool has a shared dashboard that can consolidate information about IT devices used across the organization and encourage cross-functional workflows. 

The following table explains the role of different departments in implementing an ITAM roadmap. 

Coordination fosters a culture of ownership while optimizing costs and workflows.

The future with an ITAM roadmap

The ITAM roadmap is not just a map. It’s a strategic way to optimize the use of your existing IT landscape while improving your ROI. A well-developed roadmap supports organizational stability by encouraging IT managers to adopt a proactive approach to IT issues. 

Automation with an ITAM system plays a vital role in achieving this! Stellar, a leading construction company, reports how using EZO AssetSonar helped boost their team’s productivity by 100% from 25% previously. So, an ITAM system is vital to improving your IT operations and leveraging your IT assets to their fullest potential without wasting a single penny on extra resources! 

The future with an ITAM roadmap is not just organized — it’s intelligent, collaborative, and strategic. By laying out clear goals, processes, tools, and ownership structures, your organization will be equipped to manage IT assets efficiently, reduce risk, and drive business value well into the future.