In today’s data-driven business environment, organizations of every size can give themselves a competitive advantage by making efficient use of key performance indicators (KPIs). However, with an avalanche of data available, how can you turn it into actionable information?
An ITAM tool is a single centralized source of information and an excellent resource for turning your IT data into useful insights. Proper implementation of an ITAM solution helps you achieve total visibility into your IT asset landscape including operations, vendor contracts, software subscriptions, and software & hardware expenditure.
Tracking your ITAM tool operations against measurable KPIs helps you to:
- Stay transparent with your stakeholders and other relevant parties
- Monitor process performance
- Measure improvement and hardware deterioration against specified thresholds
- Make audit preparation easier
- Enhance accountability of resources justify future utilization of IT assets
- Stay transparent regarding expenditure and value of IT assets
- Compare your organization against your competitors and other industry benchmarks
- Act as a baseline for future decision making
Following are a few essential Business KPIs you track with an ITAM tool:
1. Asset utilization
The proper utilization of your software and hardware assets throughout the organization can have a huge impact on your bottom line. A robust ITAM tool enables you to provision users, software and machines so you can easily assign IT assets to users per the organization’s requirements.
By offering you complete details on active software licenses, the worth of unassigned IT assets, and the frequency of every asset usage, an ITAM tool enables you to optimize your IT investments.
It not only gives you a comprehensive picture of the usage of each IT asset but also prevents you from buying surplus hardware items and software licenses. You can easily control the under or overuse of the assets.
When you are tracking the usage of each individual IT asset, you can also take a proactive approach for their maintenance. According to a report, 33.6% of firms self-assessed their hardware asset management maturity as reactive. By taking proactive steps for the maintenance of your assets, you can eventually improve your IT performance.
2. Asset lifecycle management
Asset lifecycle management includes every stage of an asset’s lifecycle — from its procurement to its retirement. An efficient ITAM tool streamlines the procurement, operational, and retirement phase of an IT asset. You are notified when your assets reach a low threshold or when older assets are close to retirement so you can start the acquisition process for the new ones.
With all the relevant vendor information available in your IT asset tracking software, you can easily procure the required IT assets and configure them for the production environments.
You can then track these assets through the operations phase to determine how they are maintained and utilized and to oversee the specific policies that provide structure for performing changes. As the IT assets reach the end-of-life phase, the ITAM tool allows you to retire and dispose of the assets as per the company’s retirement protocols.
3. Return on investment (ROI) on hardware assets
Implementation of an ITAM tool helps you deliver return on investment (ROI) on hardware assets. You can easily track this KPI with Asset Value graphs available on your ITAM tool dashboard.
With proper tracking of hardware tools, you can eliminate ghost assets. This saves you from paying a hefty amount in unnecessary license fees, insurance and taxes. Tracking hardware assets throughout their operational phase enables you to calculate their depreciation expense and the cost of spare parts they might have required during servicing.
This way, you can get a clear picture of what an IT asset truly costs the organization. Make important business decisions such as when hardware assets need to be upgraded and whether you should switch to a new vendor.
4. Software license compliance
According to research, 67% of IT professionals believe that their companies have not taken appropriate steps to ensure compliance. Similarly, 60% of professionals believe that their organizations are using unlicensed software.
Software license compliance is a major KPI you can track with your ITAM tool. Use the tracking software to ensure compliance with license entitlements, renew expiring licenses, blacklist pirated or unauthorized software, and track out-of-compliance licenses.
With a complete overview of software license compliance, you can see the status of active and expired licenses and get notified about the licenses that are expiring in the near future.
With every vendor contract and organizational restriction documented in the ITAM tool, you can ensure compliance with the legal agreements set forth in the software contracts.
Since you will have a record of every software being used in your organization, there are minimal chances of employees downloading unauthorized software. This documentation can also better equip you for any upcoming audits.
5. Optimized hardware and software spend
Implementing an ITAM tool can offer you multiple benefits. However, its most useful advantage is that you can optimize the money you spend on hardware and software asset management.
By strategizing the procurement processes, implementing efficient compliance controls, and modernizing the entire IT infrastructure, you can reduce a lot of overhead costs.
ITAM tool keeps track of your hardware and software spend to give you an overview of your entire expenditure and savings. With an ITAM tool in place, you can strategize most of your cost optimization activities that can be directly translated into your major savings.
Potential cost savings is one of the most essential KPIs that you can measure with your ITAM tool. You can track how much money you are saving by staying compliant, properly utilizing assets, and avoiding asset theft.
The most common IT asset management challenges include immature tracking processes, security threats due to unauthorized software, and oversubscribed or underutilized software. These challenges can be solved by implementing an efficient ITAM tool and helps save money in the longer run.
6. Servicing and maintenance
IT assets require ongoing care and attention throughout their lifecycle in order to work at their optimal efficiency. A robust ITAM tool tracks all servicing and maintenance tasks from general health checks to repairs and upgrades.
By giving you clear analytics about the average uptime and downtime of an asset, it allows you to see how well an asset is performing and whether it needs upgrades or replacement.
An ITAM tool automates the servicing schedule of your IT assets and notifies you when a servicing task is due or pending. To help you calculate the ROI of an asset, it also gives you the total cost of services.
You can track this KPI by monitoring that the assets that have undergone regular maintenance and servicing work more efficiently and have extended lifespans.
7. Synced IT assets
The implementation of an ITAM tool allows you to properly sync all your IT assets hence reducing security risks, loopholes, and vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure. Once you have synced both your hardware and software assets, you will find it easier to enforce compliance with organizational security policies.
ITAM tool gives you a bird’s eye view of the assets with data such as the IT assets that have synced within the last 24 hours, been reserved or checked out, are freely available at a certain time, and so on.
For high-value assets, you can also push verification requests before check-ins and checkouts to ensure that everything is in perfect order. This KPI helps you eliminate ghost assets and inaccuracies within your tracking system.
Read more: 5 ITAM Software Trends to Look Out For in 2021
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